Futuremark PCMark2005 Intel optimized?

[samm]

Well, reading a bit about the new Intel Atom processor (which turned out to not interest me at all ), there was an interesting part in the article over at ars technica which reviewed the new Via Nano. This really made me a bit angry... What's the story?

 

Via allows for changing the vendor string, making it possible to - very superficially - make the processor appear as Intel or AMD. No info about features etc. are changed, only this one string. Normally, this shouldn't be tested by programs, unlike features like SSE etc., but apparently it is tested. The Nano-based system lost the PCMark benchmark to the Atom-based one. If the vendor string of the Nano was changed however, things began to look quite different:

It does better with "Authentic AMD" as vendor, and even wins the test when "GenuineIntel" is used.

 

Source: ars technica

 

Cheat or sloppy programming? You decide. Both is bad imo.

 

 

The following are sidenotes, not directly related to the above article, but concerning program execution optimization in general:

 

Now it would be interesting to compare some ICC (Intel compiler) compiled programs, as this compiler is often favoured over the Microsoft one for example, because its said to result in speedups of about 10% on AMD and 30% on Intel processors. Is it the processor features alone, or probably something else happening, similar to the case above? I don't know, unable to test it, and with both AMD and Intel locking their vendor string, we can't test it on the interesting processors. But someone should take a Via processor and definitely check it out. Also, a comparison test with programs compiled with the AMD optimized PGI compiler would be interesting. Has anyone links for such a thing?

 

It also shows that to truly have a comparable benchmark, it's best to either use a) real world applications or b) to test theoretically possible speed an open source benchmark which can be compiled any way one wants and fits the processor architecture best. SPEC benchmarks show the way.

Edited August 1, 2008 by samm