Bapco claims AMD supported 80 per cent of Sysmark 2012 development

BENCHMARKING OUTFIT Bapco has issued a statement following AMD's departure from the consortium, saying that AMD's proposals for Sysmark 2012 were supported 100 per cent.

Yesterday AMD told The INQUIRER that it had decided not to endorse Sysmark 2012 and pull out of the Bapco consortium because the benchmark does not accurately reflect user workload and does not take into account the GPU acceleration in its Llano accelerated processing unit (APU) chips. Bapco has fired back saying that the consortium supported "100 per cent of the Sysmark 2012 proposals they [AMD] put forward to the consortium".

Bapco counters AMD's claims that the applications used to generate Sysmark 2012 scores are not indicative of common use by saying, "Applications used in SYSmark 2012 were selected based on market research and include Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, Winzip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others."

In fact Bapco emphasised AMD's role in the creation of Sysmark 2012 by saying, "We welcomed AMD's full participation in the two year development cycle of Sysmark 2012, AMD's leadership role in creating the development process that Bapco uses today and in providing expert resources for developing the workload contents."

As for AMD's claim that it had tried to get Sysmark 2012 changed to reflect realistic workloads, Bapco said, "Each member in BAPCo gets one vote on any proposals made by member companies. AMD voted in support of over 80 per cent of the Sysmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by Bapco in 100 per cent of the Sysmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium."

In a seemingly separate allegation made by AMD that Bapco had threatened it with expulsion, Bapco countered, saying, "Bapco also notes for the record that, contrary to the false assertion by AMD, Bapco never threatened AMD with expulsion from the consortium, despite previous violations of its obligations to Bapco under the consortium member agreement."

AMD told The INQUIRER that both Nvidia and Via had left Bapco, something that was confirmed by Bapco sending a list of its members that excluded Nvidia and Via. In its statement, Bapco said it "is a non-profit consortium made up of many of the leaders in the high tech field, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and ARCintuition". Nvidia has also confirmed to The INQUIRER that is it no longer part of Bapco.

Bapco was unable to comment by press time, however its statement casts doubt upon AMD's comments. As with most of these disputes, it's likely that the actual truth of events is somewhere in the middle, however with AMD, Nvidia and Via leaving Bapco, it's likely that the consortium will feel the pain more than the hardware vendors. µ