AMD steps out of BAPCo consortium says SysMark is unreliable

News yesterday evening arrived that AMD decided to step out of the BAPCo consortium, responsible for the SYSmark suite. Bapco's test suite predominantly measures CPU performance, and with the new APU technology .. the graphics part and thus also parralel compute part is left out which obviously is a fair point. That GPU is a huge extra floating point co-processor in the APUs.

AMD advises customers to avoid SYSmark 12 benchmark results because the benchmark has little in common with real-world tests.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it will not endorse the SYSmark 2012 Benchmark (SM2012), which is published by BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Corporation). Along with the withdrawal of support, AMD has resigned from the BAPCo organization.

"Technology is evolving at an incredible pace, and customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems," said Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD. "AMD does not believe SM2012 achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium."

AMD will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information. AMD believes benchmarks should be constructed to provide unbiased results and be transparent to customers making decisions based on those results. Currently, AMD is evaluating other benchmarking alternatives, including encouraging the creation of an industry consortium to establish an open benchmark to measure overall system performance.

AMD encourages anyone wanting more details about the construction and scoring methodology of the SM2012 benchmark to contact BAPCo. For more details on AMD's decision to exit BAPCo, please read AMD's Executive Blog authored by Nigel Dessau.