Intel accused of inflating CPU benchmark results::SPEC says Intel’s Xeon processors were using a compiler that artificially inflated the results of its industrial benchmark by as much as 9%.
Intel accused of inflating CPU benchmark results::SPEC says Intel’s Xeon processors were using a compiler that artificially inflated the results of its industrial benchmark by as much as 9%.
I remember specifically P4 was vastly overrated by Intel, where Athlon was actually generally faster at math, Intel used specially compiled code to show P4 was faster.
But there were several examples where Intel cheated, because Athlon was way better than P4.
I even went so far as to make my own test program, to see what the actual speeds were. I was an IT consultant, and was frustrated that customers were convinced Intel P4 was better than Athlon. And they also claimed Intel was more compatible, which was so annoying, since Athlon was actually more backwards compatible than P4.
To be fair google ultron alwways ran more efficiently on Pentium 4s
I as not expecting to read about socket A tonight but I still have a special place in my heart for my old athlon. I still have the CPU somewhere in my basement, I had that sucker over clocked for years and it played a lot of WoW on it.
I’m not going to say you’re wrong but I’m surprised. It’s like we lived in alternate universes.
Not that I think Intel wouldn’t cheat, because they’ve showed what they’re “capable of” time after time, but what I remember about Athlon vs P4 was that there was something about heat and wattage specified by AMD that was criticized heavily. Athlon was also not something you’d choose for overclock because of this.
I just googled a little and there didn’t seem to be a trace of any controversy around P4 and tailormade compiler.
Oh boy the Tom’s Hardware “scandal”. That story was 100% planted by Intel. I think it was the K6, If the cooler dropped off, entirely the AMD thermal safety didn’t react quickly enough. In my 40 years in IT I have NEVER heard about a cooler falling off the socket even once, except for that paid for cesspool of shit article.
That story together with the 180° they did on RAMBUS to favor P4 have made me NEVER use TOM’s Hardware since. It was 100% dishonest paid for shilling. Either that or so idiotic it’s not worth reading either way. Even you mentioning that now about 30 years later, it still pisses me off. 🤬 🤬 🤬
Never heard about heat problems with Athlon, and P3 and P4 weren’t great overclockers either. Celeron was great, because you could up FSB 50%, Which made it actually faster than the top P3.
EDIT PS:
No there were no journalists that covered/revealed ANY of Intels shenanigans at the time. The entire industry seemed to be in an Intel Vacuum.
But entusiasts all knew that Athlon was way better than P4.
EDIT2:
There was also the issue that the Intel compiler had zero optimizations for any AMD CPU, but optimized heavily for P4. That was a general thing that Intel didn’t even hide.
So the journalists are still covering for Intel to this day 15 years later, but the enthusiasts know the truth?
I’m still not saying you’re wrong but you have to admit it’s kinda strange a quick Google doesn’t reveal anything?
So they put out an article claiming that the thermal safety was defective, and the thermal safety was defective, and you see that as some grandiose conspiracy perpetrated by Intel? And you’re still upset about it?
Even if Intel did discover and publish the defect, what exactly did they do wrong? I would reasonably expect AMD and Intel to be testing each other’s hardware constantly. Would you have preferred that Intel didn’t publish their findings?
The thermal safety was not defective, only a few years prior thermal safety wasn’t even available. The article created an artificial situation that never occurs in reality, and claimed the CPU should be able to handle that.
The CPU handled a fan suddenly cutting off just fine, it handled being turned on without a cooler just fine. Only if the CPU was running full throttle, and the cooling block “fell off” suddenly and completely, the throttle wasn’t fast enough.
When did you ever hear about that actually happening?
So you’re saying that the CPU burning out when the cooler is removed, is the thermal safety working as intended? Sorry, I am not familiar with the situation, but the way you initially described the issue doesn’t sound like foul play.
There absolutely was. Intel got smacked on the wrist for doing their benchmarks using ICC… you know, the compiler that builds code that detects that it’s not running on an Intel CPU and disables all optimisations and extended instruction sets (like say MMX/SSE).