AMD employees say poor Bulldozer performance is reason for BAPCo exit

Bright Side of News writes it chatted with several AMD employees and got to hear that the real reason why the company is trashing BAPCo's SYSmark 2012 benchmark is the poor performance of AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processor. An anonymous engineer points out that back in the Athlon 64 days the company was heavily promoting SYSmark in the public sector because the benchmark showed how AMD was giving Intel's Netburst architecture a beating, but now the firm is trying to discredit SYSmark because the results are no longer in their favor. More juicy details can be read over here.

"When I read Nigel's blog and saw the press release from BAPCo it made me sick because our CMO talks about transparency and honesty and it's all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, we actively had internal teams and external organizations hired to promote/discredit SYSmark. Not because it was inaccurate, but because it is accurate. Back in the original Athlon 64 and Opteron days, when we were winning in SYSmark we were heavily promoting it in the public sector, who in turn used it as a benchmark on which they based many of their purchases on. It was us who actually got BAPCo and SYSmark inside several government tenders to win orders measured in tens of thousands of systems. SYSmark was used to show how our K8 processors were beating Intel's NetBurst."

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We expected that the source would say Llano APU performance etc., but no: "Because Bulldozer performance is sub-par. Because after such a long wait Bulldozer will not be a world beater. They knew that for another generation, we would come up way short on benchmarks like SYSmark. Removing ourselves from BapCo was the best way to make the benchmark look like it's no longer valid in the hope that prospective or existing customers stop using it."