Update: AMD Resigns from BAPCo Over SYSmark 2012 Concerns; NVIDIA & VIA Also Leave, BAPCo Responds
by Jarred Walton on June 21, 2011 12:03 PM ESTWhat’s in a Benchmark? This is a pertinent question that all users need to ask themselves, because if you don’t know what a benchmark actually tests and how that relates to the real world, the scores are meaningless. Today, AMD has announced that they are resigning from BAPCo over a long standing dispute over the weighting of scores within the SYSmark suite. AMD specifically references SYSmark 2012 (SM12), but there have been complaints in the past and the latest release is apparently the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
You can read more about the decision on Cheif Marketing Officer (CMO) Nigel Dessau’s blog, but this announcement comes at an interesting time since BAPCo just shipped us copies of the final SM12 release. We haven’t had a chance to run the suite yet, and we’ll still have a look at the results and see how AMD and Intel platforms compare at some point, but it looks like we have a foregone conclusion: Intel will come out ahead. What we really need to examine is why Intel gets a better score.
If you’ve been reading AnandTech for any length of time, you’ll know that we place a lot more weight on real-world benchmarks rather than synthetic tests, but certain tasks can be very difficult to test in a meaningful way. How do you measure every day tasks like surfing the web in a meaningful way when most CPUs are 95% idle performing that task? When we really look at the market right now, in many cases we can conclude that just about any current computer will be fast enough for 90% of users. If you want to surf the Internet, write email, work in Office applications, watch some movies, listen to music, etc. you can do that on anything from a lowly AMD Brazos netbook to a hex-core monster system. Yes, we did leave out Atom, because there are certain areas where it falls short—specifically, certain movie formats prove to be too much for the current Atom platform, particularly if you’re looking at HD H.264 content (e.g. YouTube and Hulu).
Reading through AMD’s announcement and Nigel’s blog, it’s pretty clear what AMD is after: they want the GPU to play a more prominent role in measurements of overall system performance. On the one hand, we could say that AMD is simply trying to get benchmarks to favor their APUs, since Brazos and Llano easily surpass the Intel competition when it comes to graphics and video prowess. This would certainly be true, but then we also have to consider what users are actually doing with their PCs. SYSmark has always included a variety of tests, and certainly knowing how fast your computer is in regards to Excel performance can be useful. However, AMD claims that a disproportionate weight is given to some tests, with mention of optical character recognition and file compression activities in particular.
We don’t have the full SM12 whitepaper yet, but we can look at the list of applications that are tested, and a few things immediately stand out. There are two web browsers in the list, but both versions are now outdated. Internet Explorer 8 has been replaced by Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox 3.6 is replaced by Firefox 4.0—with Firefox 5 just around the corner. Without newer browsers, HTML5 is basically untested by SM12, and while we understand that SM12 has been in development for a while, for something calling itself 2012 to include mostly 2010 applications feels out of place. Considering IE9 and FF4 both shift to GPU-accelerated engines, AMD would certainly have benefited from the use of the latest versions. The remaining applications look reasonable, but again we have no information on weighting of scores, so we’ll have to see how the results pan out.
Ultimately, the main thing to take away from all of this is that, just like the PCMark, 3DMark, Cinebench, SunSpider, etc. benchmarks we routinely refer to, SYSmark 2012 is merely one more tool to analyze system performance. It will be interesting to see how other elements—like the presence or lack of an SSD—impact the score. In our opinion most users would benefit far more from running something like Llano with an SSD as opposed to Sandy Bridge with an HDD, so the CPU/GPU/APU are not the only factors, but it still depends on your intended use. If you’re running a server, obviously the demands placed on the system will be far different from the average home computer. Multimedia professionals that spend a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop and/or Premiere likewise have different needs.
Is AMD right? Is heterogeneous (e.g. CPU and GPU working together) computing more important now than raw CPU performance, or is SYSmark12 merely proving what we already know: Sandy Bridge is really fast? Let us know what you think, but as always remember that when you’re looking at benchmark charts, take a minute to think about what the bars actually represent. The full news release is below, but again you can find substantially more detail in Dessau’s blog.
Update: It turns out AMD is not the only party to have left the BAPCo consortium recently. We've just confirmed with NVIDIA that they have also left the BAPCo consortium. No reason was given.
Update 2: BAPCo has released a statement in return. The consortium notes that AMD approved 80% of the development milestones and that AMD was never threatened with expulsion. The full statement is attached below.
Update 3: We've finally gotten official confirmation (as rumored earlier) that VIA has also left the consortium. They have sent a short statement to SemiAccurate which we have included below. The basis of their complaints are much the same as AMD's: they don't consider SYSMark 2012 to reflect real world usage.
AMD Will Not Endorse SYSmark 2012 Benchmark
— AMD Separates from Association with Industry Group BAPCo —
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — 21, 2011 — AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 Benchmark (SM2012), which is published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation). Along with the withdrawal of support, AMD has resigned from the BAPCo organization.
“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 will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information. AMD believes benchmarks should be constructed to provide unbiased results and be transparent to customers making decisions based on those results. Currently, AMD is evaluating other benchmarking alternatives, including encouraging the creation of an industry consortium to establish an open benchmark to measure overall system performance.
AMD encourages anyone wanting more details about the construction and scoring methodology of the SM2012 benchmark to contact BAPCo. For more details on AMD’s decision to exit BAPCo, please read AMD’s Executive Blog authored by Nigel Dessau.
BAPCo® Reaffirms Open Development Process For SYSmark® 2012
SAN MATEO, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo®) is a non-profit consortium made up of many of the leaders in the high tech field, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and ARCintuition. For nearly 20 years BAPCo has provided real world application based benchmarks which are used by organizations worldwide. SYSmark® 2012 is the latest release of the premiere application based performance benchmark. Applications used in SYSmark 2012 were selected based on market research and include Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others.
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. Each member in BAPCo gets one vote on any proposals made by member companies. AMD voted in support of over 80% of the SYSmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by BAPCo in 100% of the SYSmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium.
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.
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.
VIA's Statement About Leaving The BAPCo Consortium
VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. 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.
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.
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whatthehey - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
I take it all these "NVIDIA and VIA left as well!" posts are referring to this:http://semiaccurate.com/2011/06/20/nvidia-amd-and-...
If you don't have any more credible source to point to, I wouldn't get carried away with lambasting Anandtech for not talking about anyone other than AMD. Perhaps NVIDIA and VIA will actually leave, but by my estimates I'd put Charlie over at SA batting at maybe .200. He also hates Intel as much as many of you people, so perhaps that's why you all like to read his site?
"If a salesperson comes to your company and mentions the suite, you know who they are pushing, it is that bad." What that really means is that most salespeople push Intel-based servers and PCs. Probably because they're faster in the tasks that 99% of businesses do regularly -- because we all know how often businesses want games to run better!
AnandThenMan - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
Anandtech does mention at the bottom that Nvidia has also left. The problem is, the articles title ONLY states AMD. An update would be in order, especially after it is will be confirmed that VIA has also backed out.silverblue - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
It is entirely conceivable that Bulldozer does not sufficiently address those areas which Intel appears to be dominating, however benchmarks really should be vendor agnostic.AnandThenMan - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
I think AMD should write their own bench that takes full advantage of their APU, and Anandtech should put this chart at the top of every review. Intel can stop their whining and make a proper GPU for goodness sake!frozentundra123456 - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - link
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic to AMD or to me about my post. Anyway, at least for the desktop, I think Fusion so far is a failure. The GPU performance is not that great, and the CPU is clearly inferior to sandy bridge and maybe an earlier generation or two as well. Intel decided to not go into the GPU business, but they are very good at their primary business of making CPUs. How many generations ahead of AMD are they now?? Two, maybe 3 depending on when Bulldozer and Ivy Bridge come out and the relative performance.So just get a superior CPU (Intel) and add a 50.00 graphics card. You will have performance superior in both areas to Llano. However, I do see a place for Llano in the notebook market (where it is not easy to upgrade the graphics) if the price is right.
And I am not an intel fanboy. The first computer I had that was really suitable for gaming had an AMD processor, and I would like for them to put out a competitive product. So far I have not seen this in the desktop since the Athlon 64 days, yet they continue to hype their products, and somehow many people still think they are doing a great job.
AnandThenMan - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - link
Fusion so far has been a runaway hit, AMD is selling every piece of silicon made for them. BTW, how many generations behind is Intel on graphics? 5? 6? How about we just say Intel is hopelessly behind in graphics and leave it at that.Brunk - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - link
Let's assume that we do, in fact, buy an intel CPU, and then add in a 50,- GPU.As i'm from Belgium i'll use european prices:
according to fudzilla, the top desktop Llano APU will be the "A8-3850 APU featuring an HD 6550D" @ €130.
Now, as you say, we detract from that €50 for the GPU.
So what can we buy for 80€ from intel? well not much.
We could go with a Pentium G840 (http://www.alternate.be/html/product/CPUs_Socket_1...
I wonder who comes out on top.
back on topic..
I don't think anyone can hold it against AMD, nvidia AND VIA to stop supporting Sysmark if they feel like it is no longer a valid benchmark.
Actually, it's intel that's the odd one out. they are the ONLY company that still thinks this benchmark is up to date with reality.
And as for anandtech, i've been reading this site for a long time and in my personal opinion: stop with making the first 4 pages of ANY review bullshit synthetics, please
Germanicus - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
Jared, this really should be titled something other than what it is currently..."AMD, Nvidia, VIA Resign from BAPCo Over SYSmark12 Concerns" would be much better.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
The news release came via AMD PR, and didn't mention anyone else leaving. I'd have to dig around for additional details and I don't want to get too far out there. Still, rather funny in a way to have a "industry group" with only one participant. :)Donnie Darko - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - link
So let me get this right. You got some information emailed to you and you post it without checking the story because you don't want to do the job you are paid for?How is this reassuring to the readers here? Is this the case for all the stuff that gets emailed to Anandtech?