AMD bemoans Intel's benchmark presentation

AMD HAS LAUNCHED an attack on accusing its rival of making bent comparisons between the two companies' server chips.

The firm says that Intel compared a single-core AMD Opteron processor to the latest Intel chippery using the Spec 2000 benchmark at a financial analyst conference last week. But since the benchmark has recently been discontinued, the comparison was worthless, Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at AMD claimed.

"I am sick and tired of being pushed around by a competitor that does not like fair and open competition," he told hacks in San Francisco.

AMD said Intel selectively picks technologies in discussions over which chip maker demonstrates the best performance. Intel won't discuss the merits of AMD combining four processing cores on a single die in a "monolithic design" mainly because Intel's quad-core offerings a pair of two cored dies packaged onto a single chip is less energy efficient and affects performance, AMD maintains.

"All I want is a level playing field where we are just talking the truth. I've never met a chief information officer that wonders what the nanometre [scale] in his processor is. They don't care, they don't want to care, " said Richard.

Intel spokesman George Alfs acknowledged that Intel used the Spec 2000 benchmark last week to compare its chips with an AMD processor, but denied that Intel used flawed data to make its chip look better. He told vnunet.com that Richard was wrong about the heat implications of 45nm technology.

He added that Intel had simply relied on data that AMD had submitted to the independent Spec group. "We took their top public scores and compared them with our best scores," Alfs told Tom Sanders at our sister site.

He also said AMD had not filed an official complaint with Intel or the Spec on its recent submissions to the group. µ