I've talked about ethics quite a bit in the past, but it usually goes much further than basic rules and extends quite a bit into my personality. I will take your suggestion to heart however and see if I can put something together that's useful. I do agree that transparency is the best policy, which is why I have no problems answering questions of this nature if they're brought to my attention.
You may consider, to put any future questions of ethics to rest, publishing your policies when it comes to dealing with companies (perhaps a link from the About page).
There's just so many shady business going on with media both onlne and off (for example getting mentioned favorably on just about any fashion magazine is either dumb luck or a direct result of how good a PR firm you can hire), that I for one would really like to see an offical policy on every media site.
For example: "We do not attend company-paid junkets." "We do keep review units of any kind." And so on as it applies to the site.
When it comes to things like this, it seems to me anyway, that transparency is the best policy.
That's like apologizing to a garbage man for having a full trash can; it's my job :)
That being said, I've got a long night ahead of me. Of course Intel had to spring this dual core preview on us the one weekend out of the year when we lose an hour :)
I see no reason why that would be true. I'm about 10 minutes away from running our Doom 3 test on the Pentium D 2.8GHz for Part II, I'll post the result here for you to look at as soon as I've got it.
I've been hearing that there's a possibility that these chips could actually be slightly slower than single-core chips of the same frequency. It would have been nice to see one or two tests just to see (early on) if this were true or not. I'm sure you'll cover this in the full review.
#6 Anand has it right. Until you can separate sound, graphics, AI, monsters, and interaction into separate threads (you can't, any more than you can separate your eyes, your ears, your hands, and your brain), you won't see much benefit from dual core systems in games.
You can find SOME advantages, such as rendering every other frame on both CPUs, sometimes, or by offloading some complicated processing to the second CPU (treating it as a GPU or advanced compute unit) while the first CPU does other things, but that is strictly dual core, and the game has to be written for such things.
Who knows, maybe someone will be the next Carmack and create an awesome dual processor game, like he did with OpenGL and the first Quakeworld to use hardware accelerated graphics. Maybe someone will figure out how to make CPU accelerate games.
#6: This is the price to be paid when a majority of the readership doesn't care about what's better for them but only want bigger and faster. Then later they complain when things aren't delivered as promised, until a company releases its plans for its next generation of hardware which will fix all the problems with the current hardware, double their performance, etc.; then they go back to being numbers sheep.
Secrecy, from a user's perspective, is nothing but trouble. Secrecy means that the product cannot stand up on its own accord; or that there's some super-secret technology involved which has to be licensed, driving up the price for the retail product; or some other similarly foolish reason.
This isn't the only area where secrecy from hardware companies is making users' lives hell. For instance, have you ever tried asking chipset makers for the technical documentation for their chips? And I'm not talking about schematics; I'm talking about a text that will tell a developer what values to put in what memory-mapped I/O registers to make the damn thing work. Will they let you have the minimum documentation available to make your own driver? In most cases, "Of course not! That's secret information!" at best, silence at worst.
It's not your fight, but it's a perfect example of why the hardware industry is an industry, with all the shady politics that accompanies such a label. Every company is battling both every other company and its patrons/followers for economic supremacy, at the direct expense of fact, truth, and quality. A good value never causes the company coffers to overflow, so it is up to the consumer to constantly force them to offer better products.
The lack of gaming benchmarks was addressed in the review:
"Given the short lead time on hardware for this review, we left out all of our single threaded benchmarks given that we can already tell you what performance is like under those tests - so if you're looking for performance under PC WorldBench or any of our Game tests, take a look at our older reviews and look at the performance of the Pentium 4 530 to get an idea of where these dual core CPUs will perform in single threaded apps. There are no surprises here; you could have a 128 core CPU and it would still perform the same in a single threaded application. Closer to its launch, we will have a full review including all of our single and multithreaded benchmarks so that you may have all of the information that will help determine your buying decision in one place."
There was no exclusive associated with the dual core article, Intel seeded sites at their own discretion, asked nothing of us and sent a stack of benchmarks. I cast the stack aside and asked the readership what they wanted to see (see my previous blog).
It's a matter of having a limited amount of time and trying to get as much information into an article as possible. Why spend time re-running tests that we already have done, especially when the number of requests we've had for gaming performance on dual core processors is minimal at best. But, as promised in Part I, there will be follow-on articles with all the benchmarks you could want. I've been working on putting together multitasking gaming tests, none of them made the first article but there will definitely be some in the second one.
If there are any questions about ethics or integrity I can go into further detail, just ask away, I've got nothing to hide :)
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I've talked about ethics quite a bit in the past, but it usually goes much further than basic rules and extends quite a bit into my personality. I will take your suggestion to heart however and see if I can put something together that's useful. I do agree that transparency is the best policy, which is why I have no problems answering questions of this nature if they're brought to my attention.Take care,
Anand
Ara - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I forgot, I meant to mention this before:You may consider, to put any future questions of ethics to rest, publishing your policies when it comes to dealing with companies (perhaps a link from the About page).
There's just so many shady business going on with media both onlne and off (for example getting mentioned favorably on just about any fashion magazine is either dumb luck or a direct result of how good a PR firm you can hire), that I for one would really like to see an offical policy on every media site.
For example: "We do not attend company-paid junkets." "We do keep review units of any kind." And so on as it applies to the site.
When it comes to things like this, it seems to me anyway, that transparency is the best policy.
Regards,
Ara
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
That's like apologizing to a garbage man for having a full trash can; it's my job :)That being said, I've got a long night ahead of me. Of course Intel had to spring this dual core preview on us the one weekend out of the year when we lose an hour :)
Take care,
Anand
Ara - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
No. Thanks for the quick turnaround! Didn't mean to make your day any busier than I'm sure it already is.Regards,
Ara
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
77.0 fps at 10x7, high quality, with an ATI Radeon X850 XT. Looks to me that it's inline our previous numbers.Note that a Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) with a X800 XT gets 76.2 fps, so the numbers appear to jive.
Is there anything else you'd like me to look into?
Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Ara,I see no reason why that would be true. I'm about 10 minutes away from running our Doom 3 test on the Pentium D 2.8GHz for Part II, I'll post the result here for you to look at as soon as I've got it.
Take care,
Anand
Ara - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
I didn't mean to accuse as much as to inquire.I've been hearing that there's a possibility that these chips could actually be slightly slower than single-core chips of the same frequency. It would have been nice to see one or two tests just to see (early on) if this were true or not. I'm sure you'll cover this in the full review.
Michael2k - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#6 Anand has it right. Until you can separate sound, graphics, AI, monsters, and interaction into separate threads (you can't, any more than you can separate your eyes, your ears, your hands, and your brain), you won't see much benefit from dual core systems in games.You can find SOME advantages, such as rendering every other frame on both CPUs, sometimes, or by offloading some complicated processing to the second CPU (treating it as a GPU or advanced compute unit) while the first CPU does other things, but that is strictly dual core, and the game has to be written for such things.
Who knows, maybe someone will be the next Carmack and create an awesome dual processor game, like he did with OpenGL and the first Quakeworld to use hardware accelerated graphics. Maybe someone will figure out how to make CPU accelerate games.
bersl2 - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
#6: This is the price to be paid when a majority of the readership doesn't care about what's better for them but only want bigger and faster. Then later they complain when things aren't delivered as promised, until a company releases its plans for its next generation of hardware which will fix all the problems with the current hardware, double their performance, etc.; then they go back to being numbers sheep.Secrecy, from a user's perspective, is nothing but trouble. Secrecy means that the product cannot stand up on its own accord; or that there's some super-secret technology involved which has to be licensed, driving up the price for the retail product; or some other similarly foolish reason.
This isn't the only area where secrecy from hardware companies is making users' lives hell. For instance, have you ever tried asking chipset makers for the technical documentation for their chips? And I'm not talking about schematics; I'm talking about a text that will tell a developer what values to put in what memory-mapped I/O registers to make the damn thing work. Will they let you have the minimum documentation available to make your own driver? In most cases, "Of course not! That's secret information!" at best, silence at worst.
It's not your fight, but it's a perfect example of why the hardware industry is an industry, with all the shady politics that accompanies such a label. Every company is battling both every other company and its patrons/followers for economic supremacy, at the direct expense of fact, truth, and quality. A good value never causes the company coffers to overflow, so it is up to the consumer to constantly force them to offer better products.
(rant off)
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
The lack of gaming benchmarks was addressed in the review:"Given the short lead time on hardware for this review, we left out all of our single threaded benchmarks given that we can already tell you what performance is like under those tests - so if you're looking for performance under PC WorldBench or any of our Game tests, take a look at our older reviews and look at the performance of the Pentium 4 530 to get an idea of where these dual core CPUs will perform in single threaded apps. There are no surprises here; you could have a 128 core CPU and it would still perform the same in a single threaded application. Closer to its launch, we will have a full review including all of our single and multithreaded benchmarks so that you may have all of the information that will help determine your buying decision in one place."
There was no exclusive associated with the dual core article, Intel seeded sites at their own discretion, asked nothing of us and sent a stack of benchmarks. I cast the stack aside and asked the readership what they wanted to see (see my previous blog).
It's a matter of having a limited amount of time and trying to get as much information into an article as possible. Why spend time re-running tests that we already have done, especially when the number of requests we've had for gaming performance on dual core processors is minimal at best. But, as promised in Part I, there will be follow-on articles with all the benchmarks you could want. I've been working on putting together multitasking gaming tests, none of them made the first article but there will definitely be some in the second one.
If there are any questions about ethics or integrity I can go into further detail, just ask away, I've got nothing to hide :)
Take care,
Anand