Ads watchdog underclocks reseller's 9.2GHz AMD CPU claim
Four cores at 2.3GHz != 9.2GHz
PC supplier Valatech - operator of website pconestopshop.com - has had its wrist slapped for claiming in an advertisement that a 2.3GHz quad-core processor runs at an overall speed fo 9.2GHz.
The ad drew a single complaint which maintained that a running speed of 9.2GHz was not technically possible to achieve with a 2.3GHz processor, in this case an AMD Phenom.
Valatech told the UK advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority, that "it was their understanding that overall clock speeds could be calculated based on the combined power of individual cores and that four 2.3GHz cores resulted in a combined speed of 9.2GHz".
However, the company told the organisation it was seeking clarification of this point from both AMD and Intel.
We shouldn't imagine it got the response it hoped for. Certainly, the ASA noted that Valatech was unable to provide documentary evidence to support the claim made in the advert.
"Although Valatech made reference to clock speeds, we considered that most consumers would understand that reference to 9.2GHz in the ad to be a statement about the overall operating speed of the computer," the ASA stated in its ruling.
"We considered that Valatech had not substantiated the claim that the computer operated at a speed of 9.2 GHz and concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
The ASA said Valatech's ad had breached advertising code of practice rules on "substantiation" and "truthfulness", and told the company not to repeat the claim. ®
COMMENTS
@AC
Actually, I am correct - you are also technically correct.
Average power is usually referred to as RMS power, which is wrong terminology, but like I said "in English..."
Pave = Vrms * Irms = Vpeak^2/2R
@ Steve 6 - RMS Power
Steve 6,
RMS of any (pure) sine wave is (roughly) .707 of peak amplitude, be it voltage, current, power, velocity of chipmunk excretia, what have you.
If you are trying to get RMS power and have measured peak voltage (or current) and want RMS power (and know the load), *then* the v-squared (or I squared) will get you the 0.5 factor.
@ AC 2nd October 2009 15:45 GMT
"HDD manufacturers had been selling HDD's with capacities where kilo was base ten long before this."
Any manufacturers doing that were naughty, but I've pesonally never come across any HDs using that scheme before 1998 (then again, I didn't use them much before then anyway - lol).
I agree base 2 lends itself to easier low-level programming because of the nature of binary and hardware arrays, but that's what you get when wisdom is substituted by bureaucrats .
As it stands *today*, HD manufacturers aren't being deceptive with their capacities.
Seen it before...
I've seen this stuff before. I don't remember the reseller, but back in the old days, when dual core chips first started getting popular, there was a british reseller ad I got via spam (had to look, just because I thought maybe aliens had landed and changed everything) that claimed a clock speed of 5.2GHz. Reading the fine print, I saw they were adding the 2 cores of a dual core 2.6MHz cpu. We laughed about it in our irc channel for awhile. And now it's making big news...maybe I should have written an article about it back then...
Quack...
@steve6
""HDD makers are right because they "redefined" the old "correct" way"
The IEC redefined it, they're nothing to do with HDD manufacturers. This was done to harmonise the usage of the prefixes kilo, mega, giga etc.
Think about it, a kilogram isn't 1024 grammes is it; a kilovolt isn't 1024V is it!"
You make a good point, and I concede on kilograms and kilovolts, etc. However, the accepted wisdom in computing terms was that a kilobyte was 10^2 bytes. It was that way for 30 odd years before the IEC got involved in 1998. HDD manufacturers had been selling HDD's with capacities where kilo was base ten long before this. They redefined what a "computing kilobyte" was to artificially inflate in marketing terms the capacities of their disks. Every other component and most software, even today, still uses 10^2 as the base calculation because, among other things, it better represents the way a binary computer accesses things. Adding in kibi, mibi and gibi just made things more confusing, not less as the IEC intended. It would have been easier if HDD manufacturers had simply fallen in line with the rest of the computing world.
I mean, a byte is always a binary value, never base ten, so "Giga Binary Bytes" is a bit redundant, don't you think?
But that's just how I feel about. And don't forget, whilst a gigabyte is a billion bytes, is that an American or an English billion?!?!?!
(That was rhetorical and a joke!)
