Intel’s chief competitor, AMD, is delighted by the company’s move. For more than two years, AMD has named its chips after a similar numbering system and has been calling on its competitor for an alternative to ranking processors on the basis of clock speed.
Last year, AMD launched a marketing campaign called the True Performance Initiative to debunk what it calls the “megahertz myth”, or the belief that a PC processor’s clock speed was the most important determination of performance. AMD claims that Intel has been misleading customers about performance by labelling its processors by their clock speed, and that its model number rating system for its processors more accurately portrays a processor’s overall performance.
“Clock-speed, in my opinion, is like revs per minute for a car,” country manager for AMD in Australia, John Robinson, said. “Higher revolutions don’t always make the car go any faster, it just makes the car work harder.”
Robinson said he felt Intel was following AMD’s lead for the second time in a month, referring to Intel’s recent decision to introduce 64-bit extensions to its processor family.
