AMD Disses SYSmark 2012 Benchmark, Resigns from BAPCo Organization

Posted 06/21/2011 at 9:10am | by Paul Lilly

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AMD today announced it will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 benchmark (SM2012) published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation) and is further resigning from the organization. The chip maker made its criticisms of SYSmark 2012 public suggesting in a lengthy blog post that the benchmark provides biased results, and according to reports, AMD might be the first of several dominoes to fall.

"Technology is evolving at an incredible pace, and customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems," said Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD. "AMD does not believe SM2012 achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium."

AMD said it "will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information." According to AMD, SM2012 ultimately didn't fit the bill and doesn't represent the evolution of computer processing by virtually ignoring the parallel processing performance of the GPU.

"While SM2012 is marketed as rating performance using 18 applications and 390 measurements, the reality is that only 7 applications and less than 10 percent of the total measurements dominate the overall score," Dessau said. "So a small class of operations across the entire benchmark influences the overall score."

AMD isn't alone it its disdain for the benchmark. According to Semi Accurate, both Nvidia and VIA have also withdrawn support and quit BAPCo, though AMD is so far the only one to release any public statements. If true, that leaves Intel as the only semiconductor maker still in the consortium, no big surprise since the common complaint is that the benchmark heavily favors Intel.

Image Credit: BAPCo