(6 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...Even though the prices for desktops and notebooks continue to decline year after year, acquisition cost still isn’t insignificant. While in most circumstances software and services outweigh acquisition cost, buyers still want to make the best decision to save their small, medium, large business or government IT shop money. This has been amplified by the overall economy which has led to many reduced IT budgets.
Buyers look at many variables in making their client decision (ie brand, reputation, system quality and reliability, post-sales service and support, energy efficiency, managability), one which is software performance. One way purchase evaluators measure the software performance of the potential systems is through benchmark packages aka “benchmarks”. These are software packages that basically measure the software performance then use the results to compare different PCs being considered.
I wanted to poll the “community” of PC purchase evaluators in business and government to see what they use. Sure, we have quantitative information and have face-to-face meetings with key commercial end users, but the “community” never ceases to amaze me with their insight and answers. Please don’t let me down. 
Loading ...Each IP address can vote only once and you only get one choice. I’ll post a real-time summary of the aggregate results – I won’t be identifying individual voters or their choices.
Thanks for the insight and any details on “why” you chose what you chose would be apprecuated in the comments section.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
#1 by Paul Zukowski - August 12th, 2009 at 10:02
User experience is the primary “benchmark” that I have noticed matters. I realize this is very vague but it comes down to that. I don’t think benchmarking software/tools have any value. Notice that we are moving “backwards” in CPU power and hardware performance with netbooks and ultra-thin laptops and users love them! This is because cloud computing is putting less strain on the client and custom chips are used for video and flash playback.
Paul.
#2 by Patrick Moorhead - August 12th, 2009 at 14:32
@Paul Zukowski, thanks for the comment. It is all about the experience, and as long as that’s the case, we will need tools to measure and evaluate the experience.
The challenge becomes when you are trying to evaluate between different systems for your business or government. How do you measure that experience?
The market discussed is the commercial one for business use. Netbooks, based on the info I have seen, haven’t caught on at all in business. It is primarily a consumer phenomenon. Maybe I am looking at the wrong research. Ultrathins have been in commercial space for a while but are prohibitively expensive. The new lower cost ultrathins are designed primarily for consumers, which means small business can take advantage of with a few config tweeks.
#3 by David Garza - August 12th, 2009 at 17:57
Well… I would want to start with a comment: There is NO single benchmark that measures computer performance. The only thing that a benchmark measures is how fast it runs in such computer.
Benchmarks has been promoted as a way to take a decision with a computer. If such thing is being applied in every thing that we buy, then every car in the world must be a F1. BUT, there are many, many reasons for NOT to have a F1 in home. In addition, a F1 requires a controlled environment (Benchmark anyone?) to work as it works: Special fuel, an army of mechanics, special composite in the track, an expert driver, etc. Those things are NOT fulfilled in a day-to-day basis. Normally users choose a car based in their User Experience.
That’s what AMD offers to users: User Experience. Is the one-and-only platform that offers not just a processor, but two (I am not talking about cores): a Central Processor (CPU) and a Graphics Processor (GPU), bot specialized in tasks that, in conjunction, gives the best User Experience. There is NO WAY to measure User Experience, but his or her smile and how wide are open their eyes.
In Mexico we share the User Experience with others. When people sees my Laptop’s performance, they simply don’t ask about the technical specifications, just ask for one for them. If we learn to give to the user a real experience (this can be done with Servers, Desktops, Laptops and Thin Clients), we will start to play in our own playground (not in our competitors’ playgrounds). Let’s start to create our own playgrounds and leave the others’ behind. When we play in the playground of benchmarks we will only measure ONE thing… But never will measure User Experience.
That’s why my vote went to WEI, because it gives an idea. But the rest is our commitment to give the user a full experience.
Saludos cordiales,
#4 by Surya - August 12th, 2009 at 19:42
Consumers typically would buy products that powered by processor a well known company. They don’t care much about benchmark. In Indonesia the local system integrators have been offering Intel Atom products, Intel Core 2 and otheir Intel products for rheir netbook and notebook products. Your company is dead in Indonesia because consumer did not see much AMD powered products in local retailer. I think Amd SHOULD go bankrupt and let Intel alone.
#5 by Cliff Forster - August 13th, 2009 at 00:11
@Surya,
Surya,
Way off topic, but I felt compelled to share my insight on your comments and perhaps offer you something new to think about.
You say you want a semiconductor market without AMD, but honestly, you don’t. Without AMD to keep Intel in check, what do you think happens to the price of the Intel products you covet? AMD is playing an extrodinarily valuable role in the market weather you choose their products or not.
Back on topic,
I’m not an expert, but I can certainly see what Paul is saying. Benchmarking has become this sort of artificial means to validate something that a user often won’t fully realize. Sure, there are some content creation companies that can utilize the benchmarking to determine potential cost savings in productivity gained due to the shortening of lengthy tasks, but the average corporate worker is going to be the bottleneck, not the modern workstation.
That being said, I think reliability and up time are absolutely paramount. I have heard a few horror stories about business that contract OEM’s to completely supply them, and when things don’t work out, lets just say support is limited, or non existent in some extreme cases.
So if I am an IT buyer for my company (I’m not), my first concern would likely be uptime. Can you display a meaningful statistic on reliability for your platform, and when things do go wrong, how quickly can I fix it?
#6 by Patrick Moorhead - August 13th, 2009 at 09:31
@Surya, Thanks for the comment. The topic is commercial tools to measure software performance of PC used for commercial purposes (business and government), not consumer.
Would like to get your feedback on that.
#7 by Surya - August 13th, 2009 at 12:05
Every AMD products here is not in interest from system integrators. Mostly business PC user only care about Intel powered systems because it is most trusted company to gives excellent reliability and performances, so many corporate business user only seek Intel only systems. They purchase their systems from local retailer mainly for Internationally recognized brands like HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer. Few of them use local system integrator. They did not make interest to using second rate products from underdog players. They know the lack competitiveness from underdog players like AMD without complete solutions like easy computing management like Intel VPRO, reliable network products from Intel gigabit NIC, and power management saving with low idle power from Intel systems.
#8 by Michael J Evans - August 15th, 2009 at 01:12
When looking for a system I’m looking for a solution to fulfill a need.
I don’t typically build new/replacement systems until hardware either fails, or grows so dated that it no longer performs the desired task.
At that point I usually evaluate how my current hardware can be redistributed to improve other systems or be donated to friends/others.
With that in mind I try to buy hardware that fulfills the specifications I want today, but which maximises the flexibility for tomorrow. The latest revisions of major hardware interfaces, recent chipsets, and longer and open-ended (literally, or under-populated 16x slots) PCI-E slots.
For home servers software raid fanning out to >10 drives (older generation disks paired up to equal a single newer drive in the array), enough interconnect lanes to eliminate any chance of a bottleneck. Even better would be intelligently idling systems that have the potential for such power on standby but underclock to minimal rates and even power down unused interconnects to conserve power and reduce waste heat.
The one major pair of component missing the last time I was building were motherboards with an abundance of 4x or greater PCI-E lanes and -simple- cards offering multiple commodity chips and ports off of the same physical package. I should be able to use a single hardware slot with 4 lanes among multiple devices. It could either force on all of the lanes for the devices it’s using, or intelligently work like an extension plain and have a multi-link multiplexing chip attached. Such a setup would also be a good way of producing network cards with multiple discrete ports for servers, higher rated firewalls and mesh or aggregated link connections at reduced cost for slightly lower end clusters.
It would also be interesting if products were developed that were designed just slightly differently, logically laid out as if the onboard CPU(s) were not inherently the primary ones, but merely the default ones, and possibly access to local memory resources. In this way later add-on cards might offer alternate kinds of processing and memory; maybe a lower power and smaller memory broadband modem, with an integrated network port and access to all the storage resources of the host OS. Thus enabling a system to transform from a mere modem to a full terminal server on demand; or remain as a file server for the home’s personal needs. A system with either a virtual machine based, or heterogeneous capable OS like some mutation of Linux or BSD with binaries compiled against multiple architectures and which can process function calls on any or all of them at the same time. Possibly to execute tasks where they’ve been profiled to perform best, or where runtime is open first.