VIA Agrees SYSMark 2012 Not Useful, Quits Too

Posted 06/22/2011 at 5:47pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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AMD resigning in a huff over alleged bias in SYSMark2012 is one thing, but now two other vendors have publicly confirmed that they have quit the benchmarking organization called BAPCo.

On Wednesday, officials with VIA confirmed reports that the company had quit and said its reasons were similar to AMD’s.

"VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo," Richard Brown, a spokesman for VIA, told Maximum PC late Wednesday. “We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization." 

Echoing AMD’s statement, VIA said it wanted more transparency.

"We hope that the industry can adopt a much more open and transparent process for developing fair and objective benchmarks that accurately measure real world PC performance and are committed to working with companies that share our vision.”

VIA is familiar to most consumers for its successful run of chipsets in the Pentium III and Athlon days but it has since exited chipsets for Intel and AMD CPUs to concentrate on its own CPUs such as the VIA C7, Nano X2 and Eden X2 chips. All are seen as low powered and pale in comparison to the speed of Intel’s processors, or even AMD’s processors.

Still, VIA taking its ball home along with AMD as well as Nvidia can’t help the perception that something is amiss with the new SYSMark 2012 benchmark. Nvidia officials confirmed on Tuesday that the company quit BAPCo’s board too, but would not elaborate on why it left.

A BAPCo spokesman has denied AMD’s claims of bias and said AMD was involved in the process all along and even created the method used to adopt the work loads.