July 4th, 2007
All that AMD is left with is spinning the numbers
AMD is so broken that all it has left in the battle against Intel is marketing spin.
What’s AMD going to try to sell me next? A special secret sauce to boost Barcelona performance to that being claimed in the benchmark results? Or maybe some magic beans??I used to feel sorry for AMD. The company pretty much came from nowhere to become a powerful force in the processor market. A series of poor management decisions and a prolonged price war with Intel left the company battered and bruised. But over the past 12 months I’ve seen AMD slip from being a company that walked its talk when it came to ethics into one using tactics that are so underhanded as to be deplorable.
Last Friday (iPhone Day), AMD announced that the release date for the “Barcelona” quad-core CPU would slip by two months and that the best clock speed they could achieve was 2.0 GHz (the story is detailed here by my ZDNet colleague George Ou). Bad news for a company looking for anything that might give them an advantage (even a short-term one) over Intel. But now AMD adds insult to injury by posting what can only be described as blatant and unashamedly deceptive benchmarks for the Barcelona processor. It’s bad enough that AMD omitted Intel’s latest XEON processors from the benchmark and opted instead for older models, but what’s worse is AMD’s inclusion of Barcelona quad-core processors with speeds that don’t appear in the September line up. What’s AMD going to try to sell me next? A special secret sauce to boost Barcelona performance to that being claimed in the benchmark results? Or maybe some magic beans??
This is deplorable behavior, especially from a company that previously slammed Intel for unethical behavior. AMD is taking a nose-dive, both technically and ethically, and it’s hard to see how it could recover.
Thoughts?
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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