Ziff man calls DAAMIT on Barcelona numbers

A SENIOR ANALYST for the Spliff Davis empire has called DAAMIT's benchmarking practices "blatantly deceptive" and has blasted the firm for having " no intention of behaving honestly or ethically."

George Ou is the Technical Director for ZDNet, which puts him at the top of the techie tree in the old Bill Ziff empire. He makes his claims after checking out AMD-presented benchmarks for the forthcoming Barcelona launch. In those benchmarks, AMD claims a 20% clock-for-clock advantage over Intel's Xeons.

However, the benchmarks clearly leave out faster-performing Intel parts and base their numbers on 2.6GHz Barcelona chips, a performance grade that won't even be released upon initial launch - the fastest Barcelona will launch at 2.0GHz in September, Ou says, meaning that "AMD is deliberately leaving out Intel's best scores, leaving out Intel's best products that shipped months ago, and putting in theoretical Barcelona scores for products that don't even have a ship date."

This is just the latest controversy for AMD which has been no stranger to criticism in the first half of '07. The firm has spectacularly failed to execute on every major product launch across the board, bringing slow products to the table late and earning the ire of journalists and punters alike.

The Barcelona launch, much-hyped and oft-delayed, doesn't look like it will buck this trend, if Ou's thoughts are anything to go by. He concludes that "Barcelona will not be the Intel quad-core killer that AMD has been promising for most of this year and it won't even be close." Time to start dumping that AMD stock? $40 looks an awfully long way away. µ