A widely used industry benchmark for PC performance was revised this year to favor Intel Corp.'s Pentium 4 processors, according to archrival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
An AMD spokesman today confirmed that the Sunnyvale, Calif., chipmaker examined the SysMark 2002 benchmark and concluded that tests had been dropped that favored AMD's Athlon XP processors. "We definitely believe SysMark 2002 is heavily biased toward Intel," the spokesman charged.
SysMark 2002 was developed by an industry consortium, BAPCo, Santa Clara, Calif., which includes Adaptec, Amdahl, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and NEC among its members. AMD joined BAPCo in July with the avowed goal of eliminating in the draft of the SysMark 2003 benchmark the perceived unfair tests, the company spokesman said.
An AMD source said it is probably too late to change the SysMark 2002 benchmark. However, he said AMD wants to call attention to what it believes are tests that are prejudiced against the Athlon processor.
In a documented presentation, AMD questions some of the SysMark 2002 application tests. For example, tests of Adobe Photoshop in SysMark 2001 showed Athlon beating Intel's Pentium 4 in eight of 13 parameters. AMD charges that all eight tests were dropped from SysMark 2002. Access tests and step-frame flash tests in SysMark 2001 that showed Athlon excelling were also dropped in SysMark 2002, according to AMD.
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