Intel supports guerilla benchmarketing

YOU MAY wonder why the day after Intel unveiled the inner workings of Conroe and the likes quite a few extensive benchmarks of the processor showed up. Not only the usual suspects over at Hexus.net. Well, we do not anymore. As it turned out, and you may make sure you´re seated now, Intel itself provided the Conroe platforms for testing. There is an unlabelled booth in the Moscone centre that some hacks get invited to by some Intel folks.

It´s not like some source told us this time, an Intel PR rep confirmed the fact here at IDF. As to why Intel chose to let the greedy hands of journalists touch an "unannounced product" for the first time ever, the person had no real answer.

So we've made up our own - Intel must be pretty desperate about AMD gaining market shares while Intel made the analysts news with earnings warnings two quarters in a row. So desperate, actually, that the world's largest chipmaker broke its own rules. Intel people we talked to about the fact were surprised and none could remember that Chipzilla ever did this before. This may be personally understandable behaviour - everybody is proud if the new born baby because it looks all too pretty and wants to show it (well, at least the pictures) to the world+dog. On the other hand it's a tradition with delayed products, like, say, GPUs, to have the press spread benchmarks of chips months away from the shelves. As far as we know, there´s still at least four months until John McConroe hits the sockets of Dell, err, the OEMs.

And it´s also like stepping on the back of a beaten enemy with all your weight. AMD has not even officially announced a date for the upgraded Athlons with DDR-2 memory controllers, yet it seems certain that in long and trusted traditional terms, this will be for Computex.

So, Intel set up a system with a Conroe at 2.67 GHz versus an Athlon FX-60 overclocked to 2.8 GHz (where the FX-62 will be at), and it´s no surprise the Intel rig beats the AMD system hands down in most of the gaming tests. 20 to 30 per cent lead and up to 40 in F.E.A.R. really speak for themselves.

While one may criticise the fact that Intel did this in the first place, the setups really looked comparable judging after what Hexus and Anand reported. Mind you Intel itself gives out excellent guides to reviewers on how to configure a system and in its own benchmarks coming with review kits always provides exact data on how a competing PC was set up. You may not even get heavy on the hardware sites for taking the chance - it's their business to do so, and how much more certain about a mature platform can you be, if the chipmaker itself set it up? And for AMD, a setup it is.