Posted on 08/18/2002 8:35:35 PM PDT by HAL9000
A small group of PC owners has quietly filed a class action lawsuit against Intel, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard alleging the companies misled them into believing the Pentium 4 was a superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon.The complaint--Neubauer et al v. Intel et al--was filed June 3 in the Third Judicial Circuit in Madison County, Illinois. The case is in limbo awaiting a ruling on whether it belongs in a state or federal jurisdiction, and has not yet achieved class action status. It came to light this week after a copy of the complaint was sent to PCWorld.com anonymously.
The plaintiffs claim the companies deceived the public when marketing Intel's flagship processor and allege that it is "the material fact that there is no benefit to consumers in choosing the Pentium 4 over the Pentium III." The complaint alleges that "the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon."
Thousands of Plaintiffs?
Noting the sheer number of P4s Intel has sold, the complaint goes on to say the "Class is so numerous that the individual joinder of all members is impracticable" and that the Class could include "hundreds of thousands of members." According to MicroDesign Resources, Intel has shipped upward of 50 million P4s since its launch in November 2000.
The complaint does not name the monetary amount sought by the plaintiffs. It does, however, cite what it says is law in California--where the companies are headquartered--that each plaintiff is entitled to actual damages, restitution of property, and punitive damages. The complaint notes that the cumulative total would be less than $75,000 each.
Attorneys Stephen M. Tillery and Aaron M. Zigler of the law firm Carr Korein Tillery in St. Louis, Missouri, filed the complaint on behalf of five plaintiffs. The firm declines to comment about the case, but Zigler confirms the June 3 filing.
Intel and Gateway executives also decline to comment on the complaint, citing company policies regarding ongoing litigation. HP did not return calls seeking comment.
The plaintiffs do not appear to be accusing Intel of lying about the P4's clock speed, says Rob Enderle, a research fellow with Giga Information Group. They're complaining about the P4's performance, and that's a crucial element to the case's viability, he says. "As long as the market is going after megahertz, and Intel is reporting the correct megahertz, then I do not think this is actionable," he says. "Megahertz is misleading, but that has to do with the fact that the industry doesn't use benchmarks."
MHz Myth?
PCWorld.com's own reviews have shown AMD Athlon-based PCs often keep pace with or beat P4-based systems that have faster clock speeds, as measured by the PC WorldBench benchmark (which focuses mainly on standard office applications). However, the P4 has tended to perform better on certain computationally intensive tasks, such as video processing, in those same PC WorldBench tests.
In recent months, thanks to ever-increasing clock speeds and improvements to supporting technologies, P4-based PCs have started to outrun Athlon XP-based systems under PC WorldBench. For example, in a recent test of each company's top CPUs, a system with Intel's 2.53-GHz P4 edged past a PC with an Athlon XP 2100+ chip (running at 1.73 GHz) in PC WorldBench 4.
Analyst Enderle thinks the PC industry should throw out megahertz altogether as a system of measuring performance. The actual clock speed matters less than the overall system performance, he says.
"The right answer really is benchmarks," he says. "We need to have a way that people can really see the difference between PCs."
In fact, in the tech industry several benchmarks have achieved enough coverage to qualify as industry standards. However, it's unlikely any one benchmark would satisfy the legion of vendors that build the components of any one PC.
AMD took matters into its own hands with its launch of the Athlon XP processor last October, when it also introduced a new naming convention that attaches faster-sounding names to AMD's slower-running chips. Results have been mixed.
--Boris
I steadfastly refuse to make off-color jokes about this.
Not from me will you receive dry witticisms about the "3" referring to length, or possibly circumference.
No, I shall remain aloof from the gutter and make no comment whatsoever.
--Boris
I had the exact thought when I read it...
However, I am not altogether certain that the perceived lack of performance might not be attributable to the fact that her machine runs Windows XP.
So the P4 should have BLOWN by the AMD processor?????? What was/is their advertised speeds? Is one of the points of the article that Intel is fudging a little?????? Confused in Texas.
FGS
(*)Scaling up speeds is not as simple as one might think. Although the newer chips have many more transistors in them than older ones, signals actually pass through fewer transistors each clock cycle. Even though an 8088 does much less useful work per clock cycle than a P4, it would probably be difficult if not impossible to engineer a version of the 8088 which didn't use any more transistors but which could go at 100MHz. Such a chip would be less than a 50th as fast as a 2GHZ P4, even if one attached zero-wait-state memory, but getting an 8088 to run that speed would still be just about impossible. If Intel hit the speed limit with their P3 design, then a new design which offered 10% fewer MIPS per MHz but could run at a 50% higher clock rate could be a net improvement. I suspect that's what happened here.
BTW, one advantage of the P4 versus other chips is what happens when the heat sink fails...
Another issue I've seldom seen considered is that in many cases what really counts is how well the system can perform when it's bogged down and thrashing. If I'm not waiting on my computer, I don't care whether it takes 1ms or 10ms to process my keystrokes. But when it's going into one of it's "big think" times, even a 20% speedup would be welcome.
No joke. Drop the sink on an Athlon and you can get out your checkbook, 'cause that baby's dead and gone...
One of my coworkers trashed one by forgetting to remove the adhesive-backed paper from the heat sink before putting it on the chip. Why they make those chips so touchy I have no idea. [It would seem like the logical thing to do would be to have the chip factory-bonded to a medium-sized piece of metal; heat transfer between the chip and the metal could be better than what's possible with conventional packaging, and heat transfer between the metal and an external heat sink could be better than that between the chip and a heat sink due to the larger surface area of contact. Am I missing anything in my thinking?]
I put the machine together, and it wouldn't start. I rechecked and double checked every connection. Nothing. I went back to the store and bought a new power supply and a new board. First the supply, then the board. No help. I pulled out the memory and put the memory from another machine. No help. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I checked and replaced almost everything.
I figured the only thing left I hadn't checked was the CPU. So I went back to the store and bought a new CPU. While standing there, thinking about all I've been through, I had another thought. What if the problem is that the button on the case was shorted out? So for good measure I bought a new case, too.
I got home and put the MB into the new case. I pushed the button, and it started up immediately. It was the damn "on" button on the case that was defective.
Thermal expansion comes to mind. The chip carrier is ceramic, and the metal bonded to it will expand or contract at a different rate than the ceramic carrier, so it would probably pop right off just due to the heat stress before too long. Unless you had some sort of mechanical attachment, like bolting it directly to the carrier.
But that would still increase the size and weight of the thing. Aside from purely engineering problems, the reason I suspect they don't do something like that is because it leaves system manufacturers free to find a heat solution that fits their needs - a big block of aluminum works fine in a nice, roomy desktop, but you want something cleverer and more streamlined in a laptop, for example.
Heat dissipation is basically a function of the surface area of the object, so all a heat sink really does is increase the surface area - how it's actually configured really doesn't matter much. So maybe something thin and wide for a laptop or rackmount, versus big and blocky for a desktop. And anything you attach beforehand just increases the size and makes it less attractive to folks with space constraints.
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