David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on February 4, 2015 11:51 am wrote:
>
> At the risk of offending people from ARM...I find that ARM's marketing to be absolutely ridiculous
> and deceptive. Comparing IP blocks at different process nodes is just bullshit designed to obfuscate
> the value that the microarchitecture is adding. That is just as terrible as when Intel tries
> to talk about advances in server performance by comparing against Nehalem-EP.
>
> While a comparison against an old core on a old process MIGHT be indicative of what users MAY experience,
> it simply isn't even remotely apples-to-apples. Moreover, USERS DON'T BUY FROM ARM. It's just rubbish.
>
> At least Nvidia's marketing does proper generation to generation comparisons.
>
> ARM has plenty of smart architects, and frankly the marketing group does a disservice to them by not talking
> openly and honestly about the value they are adding for customers. Intel will honestly tell you that improving
> IPC by 5% is hard - and that's the truth for their design point. ARM has much lower performance cores that
> have way more low hanging fruit, so 10-15% should be feasible. It's better to be honest than try and dress
> up someone elses technical innovations (e.g., TSMC's FinFETs) as your own magnificence.
>
> Put another way, I can travel from point A to point B at roughly 120mph. Does that mean I am
> an amazing speedy person? No, it means I have a Honda Civic and can find the highway...
>
I normally agree with this view but there is one difference here. First is that they called it out directly and on the slide with the performance claims, it wasn't hidden, deceptive, or anything close to that. While I don't agree with mixing the two numbers i a data point, it was clearly labeled as such.

Secondly, did you ask about it before you got pissed? If you did they would have told you, in broad terms because they weren't disclosing everything at the 'launch', the rough breakdown. I asked. They told me. Don't know what you did.

That all said, this non-technical 23 event 'product launch' with .27 sound bites per event has got to stop. This isn't just an ARM thing, everyone is doing it now and it has gotten bad enough for me to turn down most 'briefings' lately, not worth the oxygen and electrons consumed attending.

-Charlie