VIA confirms leaving BAPCo

We reported earlier that AMD had left BAPCo, after BAPCo allegedly refused to listen to AMD’s suggestions for changes to SYSmark 2012. The new suit is said to use old software that doesn’t support the latest technology in processors and completely lack support for hardware acceleration. VIA has now officially stated that it too has left the organization.

AMD said that the Microsoft products Internet Explorer 9, Office 11 and Movie Maker, and the important Adobe Flash actually all use GPU acceleration. SYSmark 2012 has instead chosen to use much older versions of the same software in its test suit and used an odd way of calculating the final score according to AMD:

”While SM2012 is marketed as rating performance using 18 applications and 390 measurements, the reality is that only 7 applications and less than 10 percent of the total measurements dominate the overall score.  So a small class of operations across the entire benchmark influences the overall score.

In fact, a relatively large proportion of the SM2012 score is based on system performance rated during optical character recognition (OCR) and file compression activities − things an average user will rarely if ever do.

And SM2012 doesn’t represent the evolution of computer processing and how that evolution is influencing average users’ experience.  SM2012 focuses only on the serial processing performance of the CPU, and virtually ignores the parallel processing performance of the GPU.  In particular, SM2012 scores do not take into account GPU-accelerated applications that are widely used in today’s business environments.”

While it may have look like a crusade on AMD’s behalf there were rumors that also VIA and NVIDIA had left BAPCo at the same time, something VIA confirms to SemiAccurate:

”VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage
scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization.”

”We hope that the industry can adopt a much more open and transparent process for developing fair and objective benchmarks that accurately measure real world PC performance and are committed to working with companies that share our vision.”

NVIDIA has not made any official statements yet, but SYSmark has been questioned for a long time for its favorization of processors from Intel. SYSmark is used by some reviewers and OEMs today and we will have to wait and see what the final result of this will be.