Two of the world's biggest processor chip companies have made the decision to leave the group that runs the benchmarking program SysMark. CPU and GPU processor maker AMD left the BapCo group earlier this week and later was joined by one of its big rivals in the graphics chip space Nvidia.
In a post on an AMD blog site, the company's head marketing officer Nigel Dessau gave AMD's reasons for the BapCo departure, stating, "In the past year or so AMD, with openness and transparency, has tried to explain why we believe this benchmark is misleading with respect to today’s commonplace applications." It added, "the SYSmark benchmark is not only comprised of unrepresentative workloads (workloads that ignore the importance of heterogeneous computing and, frankly, favor our competitor’s designs), but it actually generates misleading results that can lead to very poor purchasing decisions, causing governments worldwide to historically overspend somewhere in the area of approximately $8B!" Dessau claimed that BapCo threatened to kick AMD out of the group as a result of AMD's concerns for the SYSMark benchmark.
While Dessau claims that AMD tried to work with BapCo to make the current version of the SYSMark benchmarking software (released on June 7) more accurate he claims that there are still a number of issues with the benchmark. As a result, he states that AMD made the decision to leave the group and "asked that our name and logo be removed from marketing materials promoting SM2012." Nvidia has also decided to leave the BapCo group. However, according to ZDNet UK, Nvidia did not give a reason for leaving.
The BapCo consortium made its own statement earlier this week on AMD's departure, claiming, "AMD voted in support of over 80 percent of the SySmark 2012 development milestones, and were supported by BapCo in 100 percent of the SySmark 2012 proposals they put forward to the consortium." The group includes processor chip maker Intel along with a number of other tech companys including Microsoft, Dell and others.
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