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.

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.

I believe competition is the “secret sauce” that drives innovation. That’s true in any industry, and it’s also true in life. Would the U.S. have put a man on the moon if not for Sputnik? Maybe, but there’s no question that the Space Race and attending accelerated pace of innovationwas fueled by very high stakes competition between the US and the former Soviet Union.

Goliath with brass knuckles

At AMD we live to compete and innovate, and it starts by asking questions like “What will it take to deliver the next-generation computing experience?” And while innovation with impact is our calling card, it’s more than fair to say that AMD also loves a good fight. But hopefully the world now knows that we’ve fight an enormous opponent that rigs the game to ensure AMD can never fully win fair and square.

Like Nigel said, competition investigators have for a third time (Japan, Korea, European Union) collected evidence showing that especially when AMD opens commanding product leads on Intel and we take those innovations to the marketplace, Intel uses bribery and coercive tactics to block those innovations. Whole AMD customer segments and sales channels are effectively shutdown by Intel.That’s Don Corleone type stuff, folks. That’s David versus Goliath, with Goliath packing brass knuckles on one hand and a brick-filled sock in the other.

The AMD Critic: “AMD should innovate, not litigate”

I’ve heard the Intel apologists say: “AMD should innovate instead of litigate.” If you doubt we fear an innovation fight with Intel or that  we can truly compete with Intel, remember that we have proven that we can out-innovate or remain competitive against Intel, a company with about 10x the resources. We are champing at the bit to attack an open, competitive marketplace that is no longer artificially manipulated by Goliath.

You may be sitting there saying, “OK Pat – that’s your opinion, and a biased opinion at that!” Fair enough. If that was opinion, here are 10 facts that should do some of the talking for AMD in terms of theinnovation chops we have under our roof:

Fact #1

Billions of financial transactions are conducted quickly and efficiently every day by major stock exchanges around the world on AMD-based servers.

Fact #2

All 50 Million Wii gaming consoles shipped to date run on AMD technology (ATI Hollywood GPU).

Fact #3

7 of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD processors.

Fact #4

AMD processors were trusted to power crash safety test simulations for almost 2 million new cars that hit the road in the US in 2008.

Fact #5

Realistic special effects powered by AMD technology have helped Hollywood amass more than $5.4 billion in worldwide box office revenue.

Fact #6

AMD processors in the Top500 supercomputer list account for more than 4.029 petaflops of computing power (that’s more than four thousand trillion calculations per second).

Fact #7

50% of Internet DNS traffic is efficiently and quickly routed via AMD-powered servers.

Fact #8

Musicians and producers who have collectively won 70 Grammy awards currently rely on AMD technology for their cutting edge digital music production.

Fact #9

Every month nearly 23 million travelers find their ideal trip using online travel services powered by AMD-based hardware.

Fact #10

AMD graphics and slot machine are a winning combination.  More than 75% of new slot machines in Vegas use AMD graphics to power their visually stunning imagery, and more than half of those machines also use an AMD CPU.

So to borrow from our corporate philosophy, I’m more than happy to combine these facts with our employees’ passion for innovation. And I’ve never felt better about the future of innovation than I do today.  What do you think?

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.

Let me tell you about that.

I met up with AMD during my tenure at Compaq Computer Corp. starting in 1995. Back then, lots of PCs sold for as much as $2,000 and the idea of notebooks for consumers instead of just business people was new. AMD helped change the entire landscape on both those fronts and the market has never been the same.

I also fondly recall loving the ATI Rage^TM Pro graphics card. In fact it was at that time that Compaq actually soldered the ATI Rage Pro engine onto the motherboard [it was in fact the first motherboard-resident AGP graphics chip]. Soldering anything on a mobo back in the day was a huge commitment and vote of confidence.

In late 2000, I joined AMD and have called it home ever since.

I admire AMD for a lot of things, but three things come top of mind:

1. Integrity, the highest levels.

2. Putting customers first, sometimes seemingly at its own peril.

3. Defying the pundits and “just doing it”

#1 and #2 are reasonably self-explanatory so I will drill down into #3.  I will provide the “dialogue” as people may have heard it play-out many times before:

• 1990 Pundit: “You have the 386 mask set, but not the microcode. No way can you make a 386.”

But AMD did it.

• 1992 Pundit: “You don’t have the 486 mask set or the microcode. No way can you make a 486.”

But AMD did it.

• 1997 Pundit: “You have relied on Intel’s infrastructure this whole time so no way you can make a 7^th generation CPU with an AMD-based motherboard infrastructure. You are dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 1999 Pundit: “New and proprietary instruction sets from massive companies are the way to go. You are nuts if you think you can drive a 64-bit instruction set by yourselves. You will be dead.”

But AMD did it.

• 2003 Pundit: “No way you can get into the datacenter. You are just a consumer desktop CPU company. Get back in your box.”

But AMD did it.

• 2007 Pundit: “You’ve lost graphics technology leadership and you won’t ever get it back. The competition is too tough.”

But AMD did it.

So I hope I refreshed your memory banks on what pundits may have said, how AMD said “we can” and how AMD “just did it”.  I want to highlight that we didn’t do anything on our own without the support of our customers, their customers, and technology and infrastructure partners.

I am excited about AMD, our employees, and our future.  I am excited about what we plan to bring to our customers on cloud server computing and media-rich consumer usage models. Pundits will take shots and that’s okay, as it tends to motivate us and enhance the sweetness of our successes in the end.

Pundits laughed when Kennedy set his challenge to send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the 1960s. We like our moon-shots at AMD, too, and surprising the pundits again and again.

AMD, happy 40^th and I promise I will keep promoting the “we can” attitude and we’ll just do it.

Note: Nigel Dessau, CMO and SVP at AMD is also providing his unique blog perspective on the 40th anniversary here.

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.

You may have seen recent blogs from me on the topic of social networks and their growth. I even subjected my Computex blogs to these media. Why do we spend time with this stuff – we don’t sell software! In the end, it’s because trends in our industry are important for AMD, and personally satisfying to me to stay up to date on these. The creative minds in our industry continue to find new ways to use technology and it’s a challenge just saying current. But what’s equally surprising is the speed that the “under 30” crowd adopts these new media/social networks. This new social model is one of the emerging Internet use scenarios that has come to be known as Web 2.0.

I find a great deal of satisfaction in this fast growing market especially in light of some recent announcements that AMD made regarding the AMD Opteron processor’s web performance. AMD recently announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2356 and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8356 now hold the top x86 web performance records for both 2P and 4P servers, as measured by the SPECweb®2005 benchmark. This means that the AMD-based server architecture is able to process and manage more data over a period of time than competing solutions and therefore keep the media rich social networks operating at ever faster speeds. As I was writing this blog, I read a related blog from Nigel Dessau on the subject of workloads and balancing loads. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to enable and optimize these new networks but we did not stop there. I blogged recently on 2^nd generation notebooks and highlighted the new features that we have enabled through our ATI acquisition including our UVD (universal video decoder) which is optimized to consume rich media such as web video.

AMD continues to focus on solutions. Just to be clear, what this means to us is power and performance optimized silicon, platforms optimized with partners and customers to deliver real benefits. These benefits are provided on the server side as a web backbone and on the notebook and desktop as power/performance optimized clients. So AMD is again leading and enabling major transitions in the industry by leveraging our unique capabilities to create, process, serve up and consume this new-fangled thing called Web 2.0.

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.

I’m a fan of benchmarks. I think they are very helpful in allowing consumers to make informed purchase decisions about products. But they generally have some flexibility built into them so you can focus on those elements you want. And this means you can use a benchmark to tell a number of stories – which means you can choose to tell the story you want.

For example, take a recent review by AnandTech entitled “Sixteen Cores, Four Sockets” published on June 17, 2008. This article featured Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems. One of the performance evaluations in this article was a SPECjbb2005 benchmark estimate. What is particularly interesting about this article is that the published estimates list the 4 socket server running AMD Opteron processors model 8356 as 25% faster than the competition while running at similar frequencies and 7% faster than the fastest competitive solution. These results vary widely from the official scores posted on the SPEC site. Now you might ask – how can that be? How can you run what is considered to be an industry standard benchmark and get a different set of numbers? That can’t be right!

Taking a closer look at the SPECjbb2005 benchmark helps to unravel this mystery. SPECjbb2005 is a memory-intensive benchmark that is intended to evaluate the performance of servers running typical Java business applications. Its results evaluate the interaction of the CPU, caches, memory hierarchy, JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler. SPECjbb2005 can be configured to run in a variety of ways, resulting in different performance outcomes. Different configuration = different story. For example, you can get different results based on the operating system used, the version of JVM used, the level of optimization of the JVM and JIT, JVM tuning options, and thread allocations.

The SPECjbb2005 scores published by SPEC tend to be achieved using very aggressive software tuning and processor settings. These settings help to achieve a “best possible score” but do not necessarily reflect how a system would be configured in a data center environment to provide the most stable and efficient performance. The scores published in the AnandTech article, according to the author, are more likely to reflect real world configurations with optimizations used consistent over the different processor architectures.

Indeed – if you do a survey around the internet you can find reference to other SPECjbb2005 scores and estimates that reflect a variety of configuration options and the resulting differences in the benchmark scores:

http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_fire_x4440_best_opteron

Blog featuring SPECjbb2005 results with the 4 socket Sun Fire x4440 running quad-core AMD Opteron processors with Solaris 10 and Sun JVM. Also highlights power consumption of featured systems – reminding us that in today’s economy of escalating energy costs raw performance has less meaning to data centers than performance/watt.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/4

An article by TechReport featuring SPECjbb2005 estimates for 2 socket servers running quad-core processors with Windows Server 2003 x64 edition and the Sun JVM. The author states the goal of this performance evaluation was to test relative performance on equal footing.

Taking a closer look at the official SPECjbb2005 scores and the estimates published in the various articles, you can see how confusing a benchmark can be. This serves as a reminder to us that benchmarks are just an indicator of performance and that a benchmark like SPECjbb2005, which allows for a wide variety of configurations, can produce a wide variety of results. And remember – the story being told is not always the one that best reflects reality….

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.

I’d like to start off my blog today by extending my congratulations to my AMD colleagues on capturing the VMmark benchmark crown. Our CMO Nigel Dessau covers this achievement today in his blog here.

While the best way in my opinion for enterprises to compare hardware is to load their own data in their own datacenters, it is encouraging to see that “benchmarkship” is already entering the world of virtualization. Because doing real-world testing is difficult with virtualization, this is a good first step. And it’s interesting to see how benchmark developers are begining to develop guidelines around how to properly conduct these virtualization benchmarking activities. These developers are essentially telling the industry that they are going to insist that we standardize our testing methodology, so that we are comparing “apples to apples”. Personally, I think this is a great idea and I hope it will help ensure that meaningfull, truthful data is available to those who need it to make their virtualization purchase decisions.

Of course guidelines are meaningless if they aren’t enforced. That isn’t the case here. We’re seeing more examples of how benchmark developers are willing to enforce these guidelines. Adhering to guidelines is something that AMD learned the importance of firsthand in 2007. And we’re not the only ones. Recently the benchmarks for one of our competitor’s solutions had to be withdrawn from the VMmark results page due to “noncompliance”.

I also want to point out that it is possible to follow the guidelines and still not necessarily tell the whole story. For example, a customer recently pointed out to me that our competitor posted some system benchmarks, but somehow omitted any reference to the AMD-based Dell R905, even though benchmarks for this AMD system had been posted on the VMWare’s site for more than a month. Perhaps it was an oversight?

While real-world datacenter comparisons using real business data is the best way to evaluate systems, I beleive that as vendors we need to take the benchmark high road – we need to use benchmarks as one tool to help customers evaluate technology – so they can make wiser choices. We need to fairly and honestly benchmark systems and report all the pertinent data. Trust and credibility go hand-in-hand, and if we do not keep the process fair and open, then the hard work of many people within my company, at our customers and partners and even within our competitor is at risk. As a demonstration of telling the whole story, let me point you to the “complete” results of the VMWare benchmarks.

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.

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