Hi,

In message , Scott Reams
writes
Nahh, Apple's most likely completely used to the situation. It spans back
to
the days of the SE30, then the MacII-FX, the first generation PowerPC
systems,
the first G3, the intro of Altivec. All of these systems were top
performers in
their day, compared to anything in the x86 world.

The reality is you can't list a benchmark without someone saying, "yeah
but..."

Of course... but you will see certain situations where the response is much
louder than it is in other situations... and it is usually because the
methods are more than just a little questionable. Intel, AMD, and everybody
else have been posting benchmark results for some time and getting responses
here and there... but it all pales in comparison to the responses you get
when you go as far as Apple and NVidia did (even if NVidia did what they did
in response to a benchmark that was questionable in the first place). If
Intel, AMD, Dell, Sun, or anyone else had posted benchmarks in a similar
fashion as Apple did, they would have been torn apart. It doesn't matter who
it is.

You're right...it doesn't matter who it is, and it shouldn't. If the
vendors would get the engineers to concentrate on running real
application software well, rather than concentrating resources on
running benchmark software 'A' faster than competitor 'X' runs it, we
(the customers) might be better off.

Unfortunately, the marketing department is probably holding the pay
checks for those very engineers, and reviews based on benchmarks make
for cheap exposure, so the whole strategy depends on having to be seen
to be winning. The reviewer wins too. (S)he clicks on the 'run' command
for the publishing house's favourite benchmark suite, and in 20 minutes
(or so) bang, there's a half page of pretty graphs for next month's
magazine or web page. Much easier than firing up a bunch of complicated
applications and making subjective comments about how they run. You can
look deeper, and learn more, but many reviewers don't, and quite a lot
of them can't.

--
Regards,
Glenn Booth