AMD, Nvidia, Via Technologies Quitting BAPCo.

[Sabre]

Nvidia, Via Technologies Confirm Quitting BAPCo.

Nvidia Corp. and Via Technologies confirmed on Thursday that they had quit BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corp.) due to disagreements over the scoring system of SYSmark2012 which does not take graphics card's role into account while measuring performance in applications that are considered by many as outdated.

"We have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization," said Richard Brown, a vice president at Via Technologies.

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday officially said that it would not endorse SYSmark 2012 benchmark and will also quit BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corp.) that developers to PC performance measurement software.

The main concern of AMD, Nvidia and Via is that BAPCo SYSmark 2012 does not utilize graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose computing tasks (GPGPU) and solely relies on performance of central processing units (CPUs). According to AMD, such approach is misleading as many applications nowadays take huge advantage of GPGPU technologies, including Adobe Flash 10.2 (SYSmark 2012 uses 10.1), Microsoft Office 11 (SM2012 uses Office 10), Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (SM2012 uses IE8), Microsoft Movie Maker and many others. Besides, AMD accuses BAPCo of implementing unrepresentative workloads into the benchmark in order to favour AMD's competitor Intel.

I thought this was pretty interesting. I side with the above too since you really need to consider the whole PC package, not just the RAM/CPU when evaluating a machine.

[complacent]

yup. interesting. and sad.