Worst Anandtech review evar

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I agree the review is bad, but as others have said, Kris admitted a mistake was made, and there will be a revised review up. Please give them time to fix the errors. Are you perfect ? I am NOT !

What else could he do? Tell the whole world they are wrong and he is right? As to everyone making mistakes, I agree, in fact I said almost the same thing verbatim in a video forum thread about issues with a vid card review here. The problem is that the mistakes are coming more and more frequently, and when do you stop giving them a pass on it? For me this review was where the pass expired.

Besides, there are mistakes, and then there are mistakes, this was a complete train wreck, and there wasn't one mistake, but a whole slew of them. I can't reiterate enough that I think Anand is da man, or that the staff here is top notch, but I think this amounts to having your shortstop pitch.

Anand is da man? Where is he? Is this a case "when the cats away, the mice play"?

This article should have been retracted immediatly once all those compling errors were pointed out, copied results from other sources, copied wrong results, and inflamitory conclusions.

I just relized what a appropraiate title this was "Intel's 64-bit Suggestion", Get it?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Yes sir, I got it alright Anand is da man though, seriously. I have always been impressed by his demeanor, Intelligence, technical background, and unusal maturity for his age. Then there is his excellent review style, ability to get me excited about technical details I'm otherwise "meh" about, and the objectivity he always manages to maintain even when a good rant/flaming/verbal beatdown of a product would be warranted and justified.

I watched a webcast around x-mas '02 that [ H ] put together and Anand was there as a guest speaker or something. Anywho, Kyle had to direct several questions to him due to their highyl technical nature, or at least the need for an explanation that required the responder be adept in highly technical areas. It was like watching a Vulcan@work He finished answering a question in which he got into the need for new processor packaging technology and such, and Kyle says "He really knows his shiat doesn't he!?!" :laugh: It's like, you're damned straight he does! :beer: I'd keep coming here even if they sold to UberTom as long as Anand kept writting things up.

 

[ThunderPC]

Originally posted by: Sonic587

Originally posted by: ThunderPC

Is this a PM or email you sent to KK? If it is, STFU and leave Anantech for good.

Wow, it must have been bed time when you posted that or perhaps you are just the biggest lamer fanboy in the world.

Fanboy? I am in favor of AMD not being in those benches at all. Maybe you should have read a little harder. Those tests were shabby at best on both sides, IMO.

I apologize for blowing up, and I will remove some of my post, but it really angers me when I see unproductive personal attacks on Kris after he has admitted he's wrong. Where do you get off telling him "Stick to your optical drives."? Do you somehow think such a email/PM would help Kris correct his mistakes? You are only demonstrating that you take the staff and it's hard work for granted. If all you can do is lunge at Kris with nothing more than a fumbling attempt to tell him "U SUX", then you should by all means leave this website.

Perhaps you should reread. Never did it say "you sux". And instead of being a hypocrit and blowing up at me, accpet my opinion as that. You don't have to agree with it, nor do I axpect you to. I find blatantly incorrect media disgusting. Never did I say I wanted him fired as you presumed. I just think he should stick to things he knows, or check, sources as a proper media source should do before submitting such stuff. The post was simply to display his total lack of concern for the inaccuracies. If it pisses you off, oh well. Welcome to the land of a world where not everyone agrees and conform to what you want.

 

[Sonic587]

Originally posted by: ThunderPC

Originally posted by: Sonic587

Originally posted by: ThunderPC

Is this a PM or email you sent to KK? If it is, STFU and leave Anantech for good.

Wow, it must have been bed time when you posted that or perhaps you are just the biggest lamer fanboy in the world.

Fanboy? I am in favor of AMD not being in those benches at all. Maybe you should have read a little harder. Those tests were shabby at best on both sides, IMO.

I apologize for blowing up, and I will remove some of my post, but it really angers me when I see unproductive personal attacks on Kris after he has admitted he's wrong. Where do you get off telling him "Stick to your optical drives."? Do you somehow think such a email/PM would help Kris correct his mistakes? You are only demonstrating that you take the staff and it's hard work for granted. If all you can do is lunge at Kris with nothing more than a fumbling attempt to tell him "U SUX", then you should by all means leave this website.

Perhaps you should reread. Never did it say "you sux". And instead of being a hypocrit and blowing up at me, accpet my opinion as that. You don't have to agree with it, nor do I axpect you to. I find blatantly incorrect media disgusting. Never did I say I wanted him fired as you presumed. I just think he should stick to things he knows, or check, sources as a proper media source should do before submitting such stuff. The post was simply to display his total lack of concern for the inaccuracies. If it pisses you off, oh well. Welcome to the land of a world where not everyone agrees and conform to what you want.

The issue here isn't if the article is in the wrong. It's very clear that it draws false conclusions. I just find it rude and uncalled for that you are labeling Kris a moron, insisting that he should never attempt to try anything new, and that he is the laughing stock of the internet. He has *admitted* to being mistaken on many issues and is commited to rewriting his errors. Just check the comments. Here's a quote from KK:

Regardless of what you may or may not think about the marks from the review, i'm open to retest and revise as many times as it takes to provid ethe best information i can. Simply stating "this review sucks" or "why did you compare these chips" without digesting the entire article has been extremely discouraging.

Now, here are two slightly earlier quotes from you:

That being said, why the #$%( are we comparing these two processors? How much did Intel pay you to do such a lopsided test? I have a Kyro video card sitting in a box if you care to test it against a 6800

Nice way to generate site hits by making the entire "techy" world come by for a good dose of laughter at the "comparison".

Are you really surprised you got the reply you did after these messages? Your email adds up to nothing, but telling him that he sucks(Which is what I meant by "U SUX"; see above KK quote), and now you talking behind his back and bragging about it. That is why I flamed you. I am not a hypocrite, because I am not engaging in backstabbing after you acknowledged some mistakes. However, I overreacted. I once again apologize. I also was not directing either my comment about people wanting him fired, or that entire paragraph, to you. Others have mentioned such things.

I offer that we call a truce, and stop further hijacking of this thread. Let's just both agree that this article is not up to par by any standard. :beer:

 

[clarkey01]

man opteron & xeon suck.


200 Mhz Celeron will SMOKE them.


chill, its just a review, iv bitche* but I dont think its goona change anything nor change anyones mind about the subject.


AMD FOR LIFE

RISE

 

[Zebo]

Checkout this thread at Aces hardware.Text

These guys obviosly know thier linux/64bit stuff and show almost every bench was bogus in one way or another.

Try 474kn/s on 2.5GHz *XP*, 430kn/s on a A64 3500+
By mod on Wednesday, August 11, 2004 5:22 AM EDT


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anands binaries for the A64 are next to completely unoptimized. His Athlon 64 3500+ somehow got 320kn/s, the one I tested got 430kn/s. His UBench and JTR scores are way lower as well. I don't have my Ubench results on hand but I can easily say that they were much higher than what Anand got on the 3500+ when using my Athlon XP.

For TSCP my compiler options were:
-O3 -march=athlon-xp -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -fprofile-arcs
Ran the benchmark, recompiled with:
O3 -march=athlon-xp -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -fbranch-probabilities

Binaries are available from my FTP:
ftp://ftp.newageoc.com/pub/bench/tscp-k7.zip (Windows - MingW32 gcc 3.4.1)
ftp://ftp.newageoc.com/pub/bench/tscp-k7lnx.zip (Linux - GCC 3.4.1)

Here are the results I've done with TSCP 1.81 so far.

Athlon XP 2508MHz / 218fsb
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1161 ms
Nodes per second: 474399 (Score: 1.911)

Athlon 64 3400+ 2.42GHz / 220fsb
Windows XP - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1187 ms
Nodes per second: 464008 (Score 1.908)

Athlon XP 2508MHz / 218fsb
Linux - GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1211 ms
Nodes per second: 454812 (Scores: 1.870)

Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2GHz / 200fsb
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1281 ms
Nodes per second: 429959 (Score 1.769)

Athlon XP 2083MHz / 166fsb (Barton core)
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1392 ms
Nodes per second: 395673 (Score: 1.627)

Athlon 64 3200+ 2.2GHz / 200fsb
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1438 ms
Nodes per second: 383018 (Score 1.575)

Athlon Tbird 1500MHz / 187fsb
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 1932 ms
Nodes per second: 285081 (Score 1.172)

Athlon Tbird 1300MHz / 100fsb
Windows 2000 - MingW32 GCC 3.4.1 PGO march=athlon-xp
Nodes: 550778
Best time: 2263 ms
Nodes per second: 243384 (Score: 1.001)

Doesn't surprise me Anand is pulling this crap again. Tomshardware and HardOCP has been doing it for a *LONG* time. Anyone rememeber the faked Celeron 300a@600 at hardocp? How about the P4-2.53 beating the Athlon XP overclocked to 2.5GHz? Ridiculous stuff.

Tom was probably the worst. I had an identical system to his (AMD sent it to me for Quake 3 DLL optimization), I ran the same tests Tom did and could not reproduce his results. I ran test after test.. finally I started disabling things in the bios. The *ONLY* time I could reproduce his results exactly was when I set my AGP speed to 1x, left my bus at 133MHz but ran the memory at 100MHz (also it being asynchronous makes the latency horrid), disabled bank interleave AND made the timings something like 3-4-4-x.

Also anyone remember the Seti@home test he ran, back when the HT processors came out? He faked the results to show a P4 in Seti@home with HT was 2x faster than a P4 without HT of the same MHz. Absolute festering retardation (seeing how Seti@home doesn't support SMP/SMT anyway, and if it did it wouldn't EVER be 2x faster).

ALSO Why didn't Anandtech use Crafty? This is a popular chess benchmark that is used in the SPEC suite and reflects the performance of most chess programs. It also has great 64bit support (2GHz Opteron in 64bit mode is faster than a Dual Xeon 2.8GHz). Doesn't surprise me Anand picked TSCP. It is the only chess engine I know of (Vincent Diepeveen knows I've (Aaron Gordon) been in the computer chess scene for many years now) that leans that much towards the P4. Of course, a P4 optimized binary and a completely unoptimize binary on the A64 is enough to skew the results to how Anand wanted.

Anyway, this stuff has been going on for years.. many reviews.. all kinds of stuff. This isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

 

[clarkey01]

"hardocp? How about the P4-2.53 beating the Athlon XP overclocked to 2.5GHz?"


.....I refuse to go there anymore.

 

[Viditor]

"Since when did "unconstructive criticism" become SPAM"

The second you put it in an e-mail...

 

[ThunderPC]

Originally posted by: Viditor
"Since when did "unconstructive criticism" become SPAM"

The second you put it in an e-mail...

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=spam


Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.

tr.v. spammed, spam·ming, spams
To send unsolicited e-mail to.
To send (a message) indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups.


Feel free to argue the "unsolicited" definintion if you like. But, if you invite comments on an article by making your email address available, all comments are solicited - positive or negative.

 

[Viditor]

"To send unsolicited e-mail to"

Sorry...I didn't realize that KK ASKED you to send him a flame e-mail.
Go Figure!

 

[ThunderPC]

Originally posted by: Viditor
"To send unsolicited e-mail to"

Sorry...I didn't realize that KK ASKED you to send him a flame e-mail.
Go Figure!

He invites anyone who visits the site to send him an email. And no need to say sorry. It is understood.

 

[Viditor]

He invites anyone who visits the site to send him an email

Ummm...he invites constructive criticism. Hence, in this case, "unconstructive criticism" does indeed become SPAM.

 

[ThunderPC]

Originally posted by: Viditor

He invites anyone who visits the site to send him an email

Ummm...he invites constructive criticism. Hence, in this case, "unconstructive criticism" does indeed become SPAM.

Hmm I never saw where it said "Don't email me negativity or I will call it unconstructive and then rewrite the definition of SPAM and call it so". Fact is, it was in no way SPAM. No where did he say for anyone except ThunderPC to email him. It pertained completely to the topic and hand. His email was published for comments. He got comments. He didn't liek the comments. That doesn't make it SPAM.

 

[hifisoftware]

The new review is much better.

 

[carlosd]

Yeah, the new review shows us the right benchmarks. The opteron 150 blows completely up the Xeon 3.6F. The Xeon only wins 4 or 5 tests by a small margin (most of them are synthetic), the rest tests are won by the Opteron by a significant margin. Ahh!! and the opteron is cheaper: US$600.

http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=21634

The reviewer, Kristopher Kubicki, says:
"Although this latest attempt to produce an accurate, unbiased, real world comparison of these two processors is likely more thorough than the review earlier this weekt, there are still critical issues we will address to get out of the way."

I think this is the end of the discussion, he admits that the first review wasn't thorough.


"First of all, AMD's Opteron 150 is the highest performing AMD workstation CPU money can buy. Thus, it is priced around $600 at time of publication. (The nearly identical FX-53 is priced slightly higher). Intel's Xeon 3.6GHz / Pentium 4 3.6F processor is the highest performing Intel workstation CPU money can't buy; although it has shown up in various OEM channels, it really has not hit the market in full force yet. When it does, we are expected to see it retail for $850"

Both are the highest W O R K S T A T I O N CPU of each company, so that's the rihgt comparison. Being the opteron 150 the best performer and the cheaper.

Nothing else to say.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I'm impressed with the fact that he didn't take it laying down, but got right back in the saddle, knuckled down, and produced a quality article. :beer: for KK on vacation, I know he needs a few after the week he's had

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
I'm impressed with the fact that he didn't take it laying down, but got right back in the saddle, knuckled down, and produced a quality article. :beer: for KK on vacation, I know he needs a few after the week he's had

Word. :beer: We need a title edit on this.

Glad to see that AT actually listens to the ravenous masses in the forums instead of just blindly "Pulling a Tom's Hardware"

- M4H

 

[Zebo]

I don't care what you guys say I'm convinced KK and/or anandtech has a serious Intel Bias.

Forget about all the bogus tests in the first article which did'nt optimize for A64, not removing that same article so people can continue to draw conclusions and Intel can use the false info in thier literature for a second. (run on)

Lets compare the conclusions of both articles:

"First of all, AMD's Opteron 150 is the highest performing AMD workstation CPU money can buy. Thus, it is priced around $600 at time of publication. (The nearly identical FX-53 is priced slightly higher). Intel's Xeon 3.6GHz / Pentium 4 3.6F processor is the highest performing Intel workstation CPU money can't buy; although it has shown up in various OEM channels, it really has not hit the market in full force yet. When it does, we are expected to see it retail for $850. This automatically raises the question as to whether or not these two are directly competing processors. Since prices in the market fluctuate daily depending on vendor stock with such high end CPUs, we leave that decision up to the reader.

Secondly, GCC 3.3.3 optimizations became a larger than expected variable in these tests. As shown in the TSCP benchmark, changing the optimization flags wildly changed performance of the Opteron CPU, while the Nocona only received mild benefits. We also hear that GCC 3.4 tends to increase performance on the Opteron CPUs even further, although we ran out of time to complete that test.

After all is said and done it became difficult (nearly impossible?) to justify the Xeon processor in a UP configuration over the Opteron 150, but perhaps we will see significant changes in dual and four way configurations. We have Linux benchmark shootout between the two processors coming up, as well as a Windows analysis too. "

Come on? AMD wins almost every single test by massive margins, sometimes double, and he is making equivical statements like:

" First of all, AMD's Opteron 150 is the highest performing AMD workstation CPU money can buy. Thus, it is priced around $600 at time of publication. ..... Intel's Xeon 3.6GHz / Pentium 4 3.6F processor is the highest performing Intel workstation CPU money can't buy"

Duh, like we don't know that?

Then he tries to excuse Intels poor performance by exempting it from the compitition entirely by saying:

"This automatically raises the question as to whether or not these two are directly competing processors"

No it does'nt raise the question. We all know the answer even you do above when you said they are "the highest performing workstation processors" form the respective companies. What else do they compete with? Certainly not the midrange desktop 3500 you had in the first review

Finally he relutantly gives in to AMD's utter dominace at the end but still holds out false hope for Intel, which does'nt SMP as well because no HT and mem problems above 4gig. http://overclockers.com/tips00636/

"After all is said and done it became difficult (nearly impossible?) to justify the Xeon processor in a UP configuration over the Opteron 150, but perhaps we will see significant changes in dual and four way configurations."


The first flawed article, still up, dispite the A64 winning POV-ray by a signifiant margin (FPU math), and every single real world test KK says this in his inflamitory conclusion:

"Without a doubt, the 3.6GHz Xeon trounces over the Athlon 64 3500+ in math-intensive synthetic benchmarks."

Dispite sounding like good succint PR lead for intel 64 why did'nt he feel need to mention A64 "troucing" in this review and Operon massive "troucing" in the second?

Hmmm.

Anyway maybe I'm just sensitive but that's how I feel.

KK did a B review in the second and still failed to include server tests such as Samba File Transfers and Apache benches (world?s most popular webserving software) which both these machines are slated for for the most part currently.

Finally, Why with these new results, which prove how inaccurate the first review was, is that first one still up?

 

[Markfw]

KK did a B review in the second but still failed to include server tests such as Samba File Transfers and Apache benches (world?s most popular webserving software) which both these machines are slated for for the most part currently.

I agree completely on the server tests, but I don't think Anandtech is Intel biased. Lets wait and see what the boss says when he gets back.

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: Markfw900

KK did a B review in the second but still failed to include server tests such as Samba File Transfers and Apache benches (world?s most popular webserving software) which both these machines are slated for for the most part currently.

I agree completely on the server tests, but I don't think Anandtech is Intel biased. Lets wait and see what the boss says when he gets back.

He's gone? See I was right above when I said "when the cat's away, the mice play" I agree I'll wait. Even though I may come accross as a AMD fanboy, I'm not. I just know how AMD dominates now... Like Intel did with the Northwood C for 1.5 years. And it's really tuff to give this presshot 64 a break at all with everything I've been reading. And when Anand makes sh1t shine..houston we got a problem.

 

[Markfw]

I thought I read that he got married and was on a honeymoon. Did I get that wrong ?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Zebo, dunno if I'd say that there's pro-Intel bias in the second article or not. You could spin it either way. A few of his comments after crushing Opteron victories in benchmarks seemed to indicate he questioned the validity of any benchmark won solidly by the Opteron. However, considering how skewed some of his benchmarks were in the original article, I'd say it's sane to question the validity of any seemingly abnormal benchmark result. Some people just aren't used to the idea of a brand-new, barely-available Intel CPU getting whipped by an AMD cpu that has been available for some time now.

He can question it all he likes . . . the Opteron still won, and won big in a few cases.

I'm glad he actually bothered to use an Opteron 150 this time. The original article would have been (slighty) better had use used a 3800+ instead of the 3500+, though with his screwed-up compiles . . . meh. Oh well.

The second article was certainly better, and anyone who views the original will certainly notice the second one, as well as the enormous number of complaints in the comments section.

Even if KK DOES have an Intel bias, the AT reader base is determined not to let him get away with it affecting his benchmarks *P We can be fairly certain that he does not have a pro-AMD bias.

 

[nvfx]

Man, Stop it for god sake.

If Intel can pay Tommy, why cant Intel pay some HardCash to Anand.

Great.... When can i start reviewing Hardware with Intel always on the top.