From time to time, a lawsuit raises interesting issues. This is the case here when some PC owners are attacking Intel and two PC vendors because of *poor* performance of Pentium 4 processors.
First, the facts.
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."
I've no idea if this lawsuit will move up to the courts or will be settled first. And even if it goes to the courts, it will be very hard to prove that Intel and the PC makers lied about Pentium 4 performance.
As we all know -- do we? -- the CPU speed is only one element of the global performance of a computer. Other key hardware elements include memory speed (and size for PCs), cache size, bus speed, I/O performances and network capabilities to name a few.
And that's not all. On the software side, the operating system, the compilers and the tuning of applications are equally important.
Except if you use your PC for computationally-intensive tasks, like helping your government managing its nuclear weapons (kidding) or playing games, the CPU speed is not that important.
If you use your computer for e-mail, browsing the web or writing your weblog, typing lessons or a broadband connection are much more important than the latest 2GHz microprocessor.
Anyway, I hope this lawsuit will bring more comments on the importance of a well-architectured computer instead of the gigahertz contest largely promoted by Intel.
Even if *real* benchmarking comes back to our daily papers, remember the old saying: "There are lies, lies, and benchmarks."
Source: Tom Mainelli, PCWorld.com, August 16, 2002
6:16:45 PM
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