BAPCo Bites Back at AMD's Departure
BAPCo responded to AMD's allegations about SYSmark 2012 and the benchmark's alleged favoritism for another CPU manufacturer.
Wednesday morning we received a statement from Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo) in regards to Tuesday's report about the departure of AMD. In a nutshell, AMD didn't agree with the direction SYSmark 2012 was taking, so the CPU manufacturer decided to leave BAPCo and retract its endorsement for the benchmark. On Wednesday BAPCo decided to respond.
"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," the company said in an emailed letter. "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.," the consortium continued. "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."
Tuesday AMD hinted that SYSmark 2012 doesn't provide "clear and reliable measurements" and is "misleading" thanks to the use of unrepresentative workloads that seemingly favors one particular non-AMD CPU manufacturer. AMD's Nigel Dessau even said that AMD tried to work within the BAPCo consortium in order to get the next-generation benchmark, SYSmark 2012, correct. He also stressed that it needed to be open, transparent and processor-neutral, but apparently the company went unheeded.
"Our good intentions were met with an outcome that we believe does a disservice to the industry and our customers," he said. "We weren’t able to effect positive change within BAPCo, and the resulting benchmark continues to distort workload performance and offers even less transparency to end users."
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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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Ciuy Didnt even know such a program (SYSmark 2012 oe 2011 or whatever) existed :o.Reply
Wont know either now, i dont have an Intel cpu . -
Flameout blah blah blah it's funny how they just talk about other bs and not actually respond to whether their software is biased. with the muscle intel has, is it really any surprise that amd always gets the sh1t end of the stickReply -
Wisecracker PassMark 'CPU Marks' sucks worse that BAPCo 'Sysmarks' It's a synthetic test race to the bottom between those two.Reply
And for those with a little spare cash laying around, you can buy your way into BAPCo for 20-large. -
KT_WASP This all rings hollow, especially since independent third parties have proven that the software is biased. What we have here, is, a poor attempt at damage control.Reply
Move along, nothing to see here.....Just like their benchmarking software. -
dogman_1234 Slap...from a slap.Reply
Seems like AMD has been getting crap we are not getting to understand. If so, i wouldn't doubt the Intel Cousin would leave because of its bigger cousin...Intel. -
dalauder Well now I'd like Tom's to run a test of BAPCo (stupid name, btw.) benchmarks. Tom's Hardware, like myself, is sympathetic to the underdog AMD, so it might not be best to risk hurting AMD if the benchmark makes them look bad while being accurate.Reply
The only way I really see Sysmark 2012 being biased is if the home user workloads use more than one or two threads since very few typical user applications are multi-threaded. Other than that, the benchmarks should be faster on whatever CPU is faster.
I'm pretty sure 3dsmax and AutoCAD are faster on current non-AMD CPUs. We are talking about Intel, right? -
sykozis I got a good laugh at this...Reply
In the CRN Test Center, we agree; we gave up using SysMark years ago, and for some of the same reasons.
Source: http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/231000110/amd-to-bapco-we-quit.htm
Seems BAPco is simply trying to "pull the wool over our eyes" so to speak.... It was also found by other sites, that by changing the CPUID, you could effectively alter the benchmark results. If that is actually true, it would seem that BAPco is trying to work as a marketing team for Intel. -
Hmmm - no comment by BAPCo that Nvidia & VIA also just quit BAPCo at the same time for the same reasonsReply