sgolds, I agree. I wrote AMD about this. Sorry about the funky indentation or lack thereof, the copy/paste from webmail didn't quite fly.
Paul
Dear Sir or Madam,
I have been a supporter of the decision to institute the Quantispeed rating system, knowing the reality of the situation with actual performance vs. actual Megahertz that exists with Intel's Pentium 4, and AMD's XP model's far greater performance per clock cycle. However, the release of the latest model, the 3200+(as well as, to a lesser degree, the 3000+), is unacceptable. They ought to have been clocked at least 100MHz higher, or rated lower.
The only way the Quantispeed(QS) system can survive as a legitimate rating
is if it is a very conservative rating, leaving no real room for criticism in comparison to similar Pentium 4 frequency. This is not the case with the last 2 releases, but particularly the 3200+. There are far too many "benchmarks", which are commonly accepted, in which the 3200+ is beaten by the 3.0C and the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4s.
Obviously, there are some benchmarks which will always be the victor's domain for the Pentium 4, but what is important for the QS system is that on the great majority of common benchmarks, the QS rated AMD processor is at least as powerful as the frequency equivalent Intel processor. This must be true for not only the benchmarks you use for establishing the rating, but also on most of the ones used by review sites and considered by those in the PC press who have influence. Otherwise the QS sytem will fall into disrepute, and you will have wasted the respect for your implementation of the QS system that had been established. If this happens, with the huge disparity in frequency between the XP and the Pentium 4, you can't expect the average PC buyer to know enough about PC components to understand that the lower frequency XP performs like a much higher clocked Pentium 4. They will assume the Pentium 4 is faster. This would be disastrous for AMD.
Paul Flynn
AMD stockholder
