AMD Rejects SYSmark Benchmark

Deathspawner writes "In an unusual move, Advanced Micro Devices has issued a press release rejecting its endorsement for the industry recognized benchmark SYSmark 2012. Developed by BAPCo and backed by industry heavyweights such as Dell, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, AMD has stated that BAPCo both has tuned SYSmark to create bias in favor of its competitor, and that its benchmarks are not relevant for the audience it targets. Also noted is a complete lack of heterogeneous CPU+GPU testing. Techgage tears apart AMD's claims to see if they are valid, while also evaluating the overall usefulness of SYSmark and the impact it can have on consumers."

Hmm

[Spykk]

It seems like AMDs biggest complaint is that the benchmark isn't offloading CPU intensive tasks to the GPU. It is pretty hard to take them seriously when they are complaining that the benchmark favors their competition by actually benchmarking the CPU.

Intel's compilers

[KiloByte]

Quite a bit of Windows software is compiled using Intel's compilers, and they are intentionally made to sabotage performance on AMD chips. When looking at CPUID, instead of checking the features they want, they look for that _and_ the CPU being "GenuineIntel", and if not, the code chooses the worst possible implementation [agner.org]. This includes some major scientific math libraries and a part of popular benchmarks.

Re:Hmm

[afidel]

Well, a benchmark with 2012 in the name certainly shouldn't be using two non-GPU accelerated web browsers and Acrobat 9! They really do have a point that currently released software is doing a much better job of using their more well rounded systems then the benchmark is. It's a system benchmark not a CPU benchmark (we have SPEC for that).

Re:Once again...

[meerling]

Of course, the more the people being tested know about how it's tested, the easier it is for them to cheat.
(Plenty of past history from both Nvidia and ATI doing that with video cards.)

(Note: Always investigate claims of benchmark cheating, sometimes it's a misunderstanding. One example deals with a claim of cheating because an optimization routine found the same process being hit constantly, so it cached it. There were screams of cheating and 'tuning' the driver to trick the benchmark when all it really was is caching doing what it's supposed to. Even though it did give artificially high scores in that one test. Once the issue was known, the benchmarkers changed their program to not do a stupid repetitive test that would just get cached.)

Of course this isn't an issue of cheating, but it sure feels like it. Makes you wonder what AMD is really worried about...

Re:Intel's compilers

[Rockoon]

In recent tests [phoronix-test-suite.com] Open64 is better than ICC at producing code that executes on the Pentium Dual Core T2370

In fact, its not just better... its significantly better.

Stop talking out your ass.