Intel CEO wants to see the industry shift its focus away from “benchmarks”

Intel’s CEO, Bob Swan, has delivered a message at Computex 2020, a message straight from his office to the online exhibitions of Computex 2020. During this call, Swan made a bold statement, that the industry should “should see this moment as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology we create.” 

For the past number of years, Intel has been speaking out against traditional benchmarking techniques, especially as AMD’s Ryzen series processors became more and more comparative. Today, AMD’s latest processors can surpass their Intel rivals in many benchmarks, especially when it comes to performance/watt metrics. 

Below is Swan’s full quote regarding benchmarks, 

 

     We should see this moment as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology we create,” he says. “The pandemic has underscored the need for technology to be purpose-built so it can meet these evolving business and consumer needs.

And this requires a customer-obsessed mindset to stay close, anticipate those needs, and develop solutions. In this mindset, the goal is to ensure we are optimising for a stronger impact that will support and accelerate positive business and societal benefits around the globe.

There are two ways that you can look at this statement from Intel’s CEO. Firstly, it continues Intel’s trend of moving away from traditional benchmarks and into the world of real-world impact and application performance. Some will see this an Intel admitting defeat, moving away from being the creators of the “world’s best processors”. Before the release of AMD’s Zen architecture, Intel was the performance leader in all metrics, but now, AMD can come out on top across a range of applications, especially those which rely on high core/thread counts. Yes, Intel is still the performance leader in many applications, but they are no longer the best at practically everything. 

This statement is also a sign that Intel will be working more closely with its customers, and shift its focus to delivering products which will have a larger impact on the computing market that what standards benchmarks would suggest. Intel’s CEO has also made a bold statement that its upcoming Tiger Lake processors will be the “cement our position as the undisputed leader in mobile computing and PC innovation”. Even so, Swan’s other statements imply that the advantages of Tiger Lake may not be seen in traditional benchmarks. As far as Tiger Lake is concerned, we will have to wait and see what Intel can deliver later this summer.