Apple has defended its benchmark comparison of its new Power Mac G5 and two Dell Pentium 4 and Xeon-based systems, stating that the tests performed and the way those tests were conducted is all above board.
Far from adjusting the Intel-based machines to yield lower scores, Apple's contract tester, VeriTest, actually chose settings to improve the Dell scores, Apple's VP of hardware product marketing, Greg Joswiak, told Slashdot yesterday.
Apple came under criticism from a number of web sites yesterday after they compared its SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark results with others found on the SPEC web site. SPEC-published scores for one of the comparison machines, Dell's dual-3.06GHz Xeon-based Precision Workstation 650, were rather higher than those published by Apple.
A closer look at VeriTest's findings revealed the company had apparently tweaked the G5 to improve performance and switched off apparently performance-boosting features like HyperThreading.
News source: The Register
