General Gaming Article

Intel Settles Pentium 4 Benchmark Manipulation Class Action Lawsuit

Posted: 02 Nov 2014 06:19 PM PST

Too little, too late

As hard as it may be to believe now, Advanced Micro Devices once presented a serious threat to Intel's dominance of the PC microprocessor market. However, if you invested in a first-generation Pentium 4 processor (codenamed Willamette) between November 20, 2000 and June 30, 2002, you may not have particularly fond reminiscences of AMD's heyday. Your recollections of that time may very well be of your new Pentium 4 chip living up neither to your expectations nor to the impressive "independent third-party" benchmarks that Intel released to reviewers in the lead up to Pentium 4's launch.

The good news for all you Pentium 4 early adopters is that Intel has finally agreed to settle a decade-long class action lawsuit, which alleges that when confronted by "pervasive design flaws" and "dismal" performance scores in the lead up to the launch of first-gen Pentium 4 chips, the company resorted to greatly exaggerating their capabilities through cooked-up numbers. Even though the new chips were, in reality, no match for some of the existing Pentium III models, let alone Athlon processors from rival AMD, the lawsuit alleges that the fabricated benchmarks were enough to convince the marketplace to move to Pentium 4.

"Intel used its enormous resources and influence in the computing industry to, in Intel's own words, 'falsely improve' the Pentium 4's performance scores. It secretly wrote benchmark tests that would give the Pentium 4 higher scores, then released and marketed these 'new' benchmarks to performance reviewers as 'independent third-party' benchmarks," reads the class action complaint against Intel and HP.

All members of the class are entitled to a princely cash reimbursement of $15. Please visit this page to find out if you qualify.

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Windows 8.1 Market Share Finally Hits Double Digits

Posted: 02 Nov 2014 03:06 PM PST

Windows 8 and 8.1 combined share also at all-time high

The combined market share of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 looked to be heading back towards single digits early last month when Net Applications released its desktop OS usage data for the month of September, revealing that the already teetering combo had shed over a percentage points' worth of market share to reach 12.26 percent. That appears to have been a false alarm as the latest data from Net Applications data shows an unexpected surge in Windows 8.1 uptake.

Windows 8.1 finished October with 10.92 percent of the desktop market — the first time it has hit double digits. This sharp increase of over 4 percentage points was enough to help propel the combined market share of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to beyond the 15 percent mark — also a first. With a combined market share of 16.8 percent, these two versions of Microsoft's latest desktop operating system are now within touching distance of Windows XP, which saw its share fall sharply from 23.87 percent to 17.18 percent in October.

Still firmly entrenched at the top, Windows 7 also witnessed a slight increase in its market share. Per Net Applications, the popular OS ended the month with a 53.05 percent share, up slightly from 52.71 percent a month ago. The fact that October was the last month of Windows 7 consumer PC sales may have contributed to this small increase.

With Windows 10 due out next year, it will be interesting to see whether or not Windows 8/8.1 will be able sustain this momentum. What do you think?

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