BAPCo fires back at AMD and Nvidia confirms it quit too.

Posted 06/21/2011 at 4:38pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Responding to allegations that the new SYSMark2012 benchmark isn’t valid for today’s hardware, BAPCo fired back at AMD by saying that the company approved 80 percent of the proposals in the benchmark and asking how they can be invalid.

Business Applications Performance Corporation officials also denied that they tried to expel AMD from the group after AMD started publically grousing.

AMD's complaints seem tied to the introduction of its new Llano platform which is admittedly slower in x86 than comparable Intel chips, but far faster in graphics performance.

““Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was, until recently, a long standing member of BAPCo.  We welcomed AMD's full participation in the two year development cycle of SYSmark 2012, AMD's leadership role in creating the development process that BAPCo uses today and in providing expert resources for developing the workload contents,” the organization said in a statement.

“Each member in BAPCo gets one vote on any proposals made by member companies.  AMD voted in support of over 80 percent of the SYSmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by BAPCo in 100 percent of the SYSmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium.”

On Tuesday morning, AMD officially cut its ties to BAPCo shortly after the new benchmark was released and went public saying that the SYSMark2012 wasn’t relevant and leads to $8 billion being misspent and favoring Intel’s processors over AMDs. AMD said for going public, BAPCo threatened to expel the company from the group. BAPCo, however, says nothing of the sort happened.

“BAPCo also notes for the record that, contrary to the false assertion by AMD, BAPCo never threatened AMD with expulsion from the consortium, despite previous violations of its obligations to BAPCo under the consortium member agreement,” the group said.

“BAPCo is disappointed that a former member of the consortium has chosen once more to violate the confidentiality agreement they signed, in an attempt to dissuade customers from using SYSmark to assess the performance of their systems. BAPCo believes the performance measured in each of the six scenarios in SYSmark 2012, which is based on the research of its membership, fairly reflects the performance that users will see when fully utilizing the included applications."

BAPCo said despite AMD leaving, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and ARCintuition continue to be members of the group and that the the applications were selected for the test using market research.

This isn’t AMD’s first time complaining about BAPCo. The company previously raised hell over what it said were baked benchmarks in MobileMark 2007 favoring Intel parts over AMDs. AMD didn’t just quit alone this time though. Semiaccurate.com reported on Monday that VIA and Nvidia also quit BAPCo. Nvidia officials confirmed to Maximum PC that the company also left BAPCo but would not comment on why.