AMD Will Not Endorse SYSmark 2012 Benchmark & Resigns From BAPCo
In a rather unheard of move this morning, chip firm AMD announced that they will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 Benchmark (SM2012), which is published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation). Along with the withdrawal of support, AMD has resigned from the BAPCo organization. We checked out the Bapco website and the non-profit consortium is said to still include: ARCIntuition, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba and others. Companies like AMD, NVIDIA, VIA, IBM and others are not part of consortium. Legit Reviews just got our hands on the benchmark two weeks ago and was shocked to see Firefox 3.x and Flash 10.1 being used for the benchmark. Our readers are running Firefox 5.x and Flash 10.3, so even this brand new benchmark is running software that our readers have already moved on from and that is the reason you haven’t seen it used on Legit Reviews.
AMD decided to do what we believed was the right thing for the industry and our customers, so we continued to work within BAPCo to try to get the next-generation benchmark, SYSmark12 (SM2012), right. Our hope was to effect change so that it would be open, transparent and processor-neutral. We got workloads included that represent the things you and I actually do in a day (instead of 35,000 line spreadsheets!). But the question remained: what weighting would BAPCo ultimately give to the real-world workloads since it is this weighting that defines the actual benchmark scores. Unfortunately, our good intentions were met with an outcome that we believe does a disservice to the industry and our customers. We werent able to effect positive change within BAPCo, and the resulting benchmark continues to distort workload performance and offers even less transparency to end users. Once again, BAPCo chose to ignore the opportunity to promote openness and transparency.
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