AMD Quits BAPCo over Disagreement with SYSmark 2012 Benchmark

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday officially said that it would not endorse SYSmark 2012 benchmark and will also quit BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corp.) that developers to PC performance measurement software. AMD and, according to some reports, Nvidia Corp. and Via Technologies have disagreements with BAPCo over the benchmark results.

SYSmark 2012 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, data/financial analysis, system management, media creation, 3D modeling and web development. 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. The benchmark is used by many enterprises, PC makers, government organizations and other institutions to determine the performance in business applications and make the right choice of PCs or components.

The main concern of AMD, and presumably other semiconductor companies, is that BAPCo SYSmark 2012 does not utilize graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose computing tasks (GPGPU) and solely relies on performance of central processing units (CPUs). According to AMD, such approach is misleading as many applications nowadays take huge advantage of GPGPU technologies, including Adobe Flash 10.2 (SYSmark 2012 uses 10.1), Microsoft Office 11 (SM2012 uses Office 10), Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (SM2012 uses IE8), Microsoft Movie Maker and many others. Besides, AMD accuses BAPCo of implementing unrepresentative workloads into the benchmark in order to favour AMD's competitor Intel.

"The SYSmark benchmark is not only comprised of unrepresentative workloads (workloads that ignore the importance of heterogeneous computing and, frankly, favor our competitor’s designs), but it actually generates misleading results that can lead to very poor purchasing decisions, causing governments worldwide to historically overspend somewhere in the area of approximately $8 billion," said Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer of AMD.

BAPCo does not agree with AMD and claims that the sole purpose of the company's demarche is to devaluate SYSmark 2012 in order to prevent the customers from using it to evaluate performance of AMD-powered systems.

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