Gloves come off in Intel and AMD chip wars

After a relatively quiet period in the competition between AMD and Intel, AMD has once again lashed out against its chip rival.

AMD is accusing Intel of making outdated and skewed comparisons between the chips of the two companies.

"I am sick and tired of being pushed around by a competitor that does not like fair and open competition," Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at AMD, said at a media event in San Francisco.

AMD alleged that Intel compared a single-core AMD Opteron processor to the latest Intel chip using the Spec 2000 benchmark at a financial analyst conference last week.

The benchmark has recently been discontinued, rendering the comparison void, Richard complained.

Intel spokesman George Alfs acknowledged that Intel used the Spec 2000 benchmark last week to compare its chips with an AMD processor, but denied that Intel used flawed data to make its chip look better.

Instead he insisted that the company relied on data that AMD had submitted to the independent Spec group.

"We took their top public scores and compared them with our best scores," Alfs told vnunet.com.

He also asked why AMD had not filed an official complaint with Intel or the Spec on its recent submissions to the group.

Vendors commonly use industry standard benchmarks to show off the performance of their hardware or software. The data is intended to allow enterprises to compare the performance of competing systems.

But such metrics rarely reflect performance in live applications because the tests are commonly performed under ideal conditions.

"AMD is frustrated that Intel is issuing misleading benchmark test results. But everybody does it. It's a rotten system, but it's better than the alternative," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst covering semiconductor technologies at Insight 64.

The alternative, he added, would require manual testing by the end user for each application and system.