Lying, bullying and being driven by marketers is par for the course for the biggest CPU manufacturer in the world.

2000 Selling overclocked processors

Intel, after having lost the race to 1Ghz to AMD, overclocked a CPU to 1.13GHz.

I offered Tom my working 1.13GHz sample so that he may get some benchmarks and complete a review of the processor.  After declining, I made the same offer to Kyle who accepted.  Kyle then contacted Tom and mentioned that he’d like to get a hold of Tom’s CPU which also failed most of the tests and demonstrate this in front of an Intel engineer.

Armed with our 1.13GHz sample, Tom’s sample and Kyle’s sample, the Intel engineer and Kyle went at it.

You can visit Kyle’s description of what tests each CPU failed, but the basic conclusion was that our 1.13GHz sample ran through all of the tests perfectly, with one exception.  Tom provided Kyle with a hard drive formatted with Tom’s standard Linux test suite, which included a Kernel compilation test that Tom normally runs in order to test the stability of overclocked processors.  According to Tom, all normally clocked CPUs he has benchmarked have passed this test flawlessly, while most overclocked CPUs fail.

It was on this test that all three chips failed, a test that has never failed on a normally clocked CPU but has failed on overclocked processors.  Why would a normally clocked CPU fail a test that only overclocked CPUs would fail?

There is a fine line between “overclocking” and what AMD/Intel do to increase the yields on their CPUs, but as long as they work, increasing the core voltage of a CPU in order to hit a higher clock speed is fine.  Overclockers do it on a daily basis and run their systems harder than a lot of your average home users with very few problems.

It seems like this time around Intel may have pushed a little too far, since only two of the processors that made it out as review samples seemed to fail horribly, however it wouldn’t be surprising if most of the review samples failed the Linux kernel compilation test.  The fact that the three processors, ours, Kyle’s and Tom’s all failed the Linux kernel compilation test, a test that is failed normally by processors with poor margins, seems to indicate that maybe Intel was taking a bigger risk than they should’ve with releasing a 1.13GHz Pentium III.  Is clock speed really that important?

Looks like Intel is a company dominated by marketers and not by engineers.

2010 Using its size to out-leverage AMD

Being the biggest CPU manufacturer in the world means you have great power and, in Intel’s case, absolutely no responsibility.

The New York suit alleges that Intel gave Dell billions in rebates and deals so long as it didn’t sell any AMD-powered computers, paid HP hundreds of millions to cap sales of AMD-powered business desktops at 5 percent, and paid IBM not to market an AMD server.

Intel has “settled” which I translate to “realized they’re guilty if they were to proceed with the court case any further, so they gave out some blood money to make people shut up”.

This is why I buy AMD chips: they haven’t yet begun to fuck over smaller folk just to stay on top of the hill. Note that when AMD does become a bully I’ll go over to buying someone else’s chips. VIA, if they still exist…