Posts by Joe Temple

Adding GHz is a common practice in the intel world.

For many years users of Intel architecture have used "MHz" as a capacity metric. It as been common practice to speak of the capacity of an Intel processor as "x MHz". In these assertions x is arrived at by multiplying the number of cores by the clock speed in MHz. The metric was call MHz rather than the more correct units "Processor * MHz" . It appears that our advertiser simply continued this practice but scaled the clock speed to GHz rather than MHz.. My guess is that they made the unfortunate but common error of talking about speed rather than capacity in the text that used the metric.

This metric used nearly always overstates the capacity of a multicore processor compared to a single core processor, but nevertheless has been in use for some time. Also 2 to 4 cores on a single chip the metric is much closer the than for larger core counts or 2-4 core machines implemented with single core chips. This means that the metric is more valid for single chip comparisons than it was for the multichip comparisons for whcih it was once in common use.

While the semantics may indeed be a violation , the use of the metric has served the Intel community for many years and can be quite accurate for loads that work well on Intel system. Since there is no such thing as "universal capacity metric" for comparison among server platforms, the metric is probably as good, if optimistic, as any other "benchmark" used to represent capacity. The problem is that if we hold advertisers to this standard, we give too much credance to the ability of "certified standard benchmarks" to represent real work.

One other point of interest. If you look at "standard metrics", I think you will find that AMD chips have traditionally gotten more work done per GHz than the Intel made cousins, so comparison to Intel chips based on this metric can actually undersell rather than oversell the chip. SInce the rules are set up to put a check on hype, it seems (from a technical view) to be a rather silly and frivolous ruling.