Intel, HP, Gateway sued over Pentium 4 performance

The report, in US publication PC World, said that the complaint was filed in early June.

It is jointly filed against Intel, Gateway and Hewlett Packard, and the class action complains the introduction of the Pentium 4 led to misleading performance claims.

The case was filed by lawyers Carr Korein Tillery on behalf of five litigants.

The sums of money involved for the five plaintiffs would amount to no more than around $75,000, the magazine notes. But tens of millions of Pentium 4s have been sold since the processor was first launched.

The class action centres around the performance of the processors, the so-called Megahertz Myth.

Intel and competitor AMD for years leapfrogged each other by launching new CPUs at higher MHz speeds, until last year, when the latter firm introduced the so-called PR rating. This claims to measure the performance of a chip by reference to the real world results of applications, rather than just raw speed.

Any court which tackles this kind of case will have to face the horrors of benchmarketing, a quicksand that has trapped many over the years.

Here's the PC World piece. µ

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