Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[upc]

Is that enough to overcome the Intel brandname ?

The performance rating is not the place to overcome the Intel brandname. The performance rating should be accurate. Until AMD has a stronger brand, they will not get price parity, but so be it. They get even worse pricing by rating their parts too low.

By your logic, AMD should rate the 3800+ A64 as the 2800+ A64. Surely the reviewers would love it, and the public would recognize the value, and AMD would get a lot more for the parts than Intel gets for a 2.8 GHz Prescott... whoops.

Now's not the time to be lowering the defences and softening the PR ratings

It's raising the marketing and pricing defenses and correcting the rating giveaway now that the part is clearly positioned against Celeron. You could argue that AMD should produce higher-performance value parts and therefore counteract some of the brand/pricing effect. But to argue that AMD should mislabel the performance of their parts is folly because you are dealing with mass consumers here and they believe the ratings, and have no knowledge of any un-rated extra performance. There is much discussion of this on the silicon investor thread and in fact I must credit those posters with much of my thinking on this issue.

Another way to look at it is that it is not "softening the PR ratings". It is changing from having one rating system (a disaster when your competitor is using two) to having two systems, and moving some parts from into the new brand and its rating system.

upc