Ziff-Davis rejigs benchmarks after AMD complaint

Distributors and customers of AMD have received a bulletin from the company pointing out that Ziff-Davis' 3DWinmark benchmarks using the null driver are inaccurate and misleading. AMD's bone of contention is that processors, such as AMD's K6-III and Pentium III are not compared fairly. Ziff-Davis has now posted a warning on its Winbench Web site. It says: "Don't compare processors using Null Driver Tests" and admits to problems in the benchmark, complicated by "certain attributes" of the Null driver. It continues: "The results from Null driver runs do not accurately reflect the performance differences between different CPU architectures". An Intel representative said: "This is unlikely to be an architectural problem. The cores of both the PII and the Celeron are identical." Ahem... ®