Advanced Micro Devices has quit a PC industry consortium, implying the integrity of a widely used benchmark is biased toward Intel chips.
In a blog Wednesday, an AMD executive provided a long explanation about why AMD has quit the BAPCo industry consortium, which develops and distributes the SYSmark benchmark.
“Customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems,” Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD, said in a statement. “AMD does not believe SM2012 (SYSMark 2012) achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium.”
Graphics chip supplier Nvidia has also quit the group. The company confirmed to CNET that it has quit but declined to comment further.
AMD’s argument revolves around the lack of emphasis on what is called general-purpose computing on graphics processing units, or GPGPU. This is an evolving computing paradigm that attaches increasing importance to the GPU for accelerating common tasks such as encoding/decoding of video and audio and Web browsing.