This "business sense" is also illegal. In fact, Intel is not permitted to use SYSmark as part of their sales pitch (neither is AMD, not they'd want to). Let's not pretend otherwise here, SYSmark is heavily biased, and not a useful tool to gauge performance on a variety of platforms. If Anandtech continues to use it, then I would say the reviews here have lost all hope of being impartial.
Of course it is illegal, why else would I have kept saying Intel is "guilty" of it if it isn't some sort of crime or underhanded tactic?
It is nice that you have this view of sysmark. I would certainly agree with you, as an enthusiast. But the issue here is not about "enthusiasts" or the needs of enthusiasts. So as a person invovled in corporate IT, I would have to disagree - we need standards. They (Intel, AMD and friends) have been endorsing sysmark for the past decade, so we (industry) have used it for our own corporate and government purchasing purposes. It makes sense. That's why BAPCo was started in the first place, to provide such a standard we can use.
This resignation by AMD, NV and VIA will certainly have an effect - but only when something comes around to replace sysmark. Otherwise, despite their messages and complaints and protests about sysmark, government and corporate purchasers that have been using sysmark will almost assuredly continue to use sysmark, simply because despite the controversy, there is no alternative yet. (And yeah, these entities are known for being slow to adapt or change)
I have no idea why we are even arguing this. It is almost self-evident. I have not yet come across any serious government or corportate purchaser who does not need/want/use an industry standard benchmark to base or justify purchases on (the expected bribes notwithstanding; even after being bribed, there's still the matter of justification that is left, or at the very least, the matter of "covering thy ass").
As for Anandtech using sysmark, I do not know if they would adopt sysmark 2012, but they seem completely justified in adopting earlier versions, since it still has AMD's stamp of approval, and it is the de facto standard. No matter your feelings, they can't leave that out. The good news is that it is just one benchmark out of the 2 or 3 dozen that they use! Given the wealth of benchmarks, and how easy they have made it through CPU Bench to access and filter this info, I see no problem. Most of the other sites do the same thing anyway - they have a full suite of tests, because of the reality that no single benchmark will realistically capture the "difference between processors" when this difference greatly depends upon use case.
For example, for my own purposes, I completely skip most benches and just look at Cinebench single and multi-threaded, Excel, archiving, and game benchmarks. Those are the only things that matter to me personally, and upon which I base my "decisions" or musings. That's something you generally can't do as a gov't / corporate purchaser though. You can't put your justification as "Anandtech finds this a 25% better computing platform based on the Cinebench, Excel, archiving, and gaming benchmarks" (actually, that may fly in some companies, since we aren't talking of cookie-cutter types all over the world, but that's more the exception instead of the expected; I could definitely use that in our company). That's because Anandtech isn't an industry-recognized and industry-accepted benchmarking entity, neither is Tom's, [H], Xbit, Hardware Canucks, or whoever else you can think of. But BAPCo is (it was formed for that very purpose), and so their product is the industry standard for a lot of huge organizations and government.
I know what you are wishing for - a fairer metric that doesn't cheat AMD, and NV, and VIA. That's what I want as well. Why else would I have said "yep, Intel is guilty of fixing this bench, most likely"?
But just because I want a fairer metric doesn't mean I can just blindly believe (and declare to all) that suddenly sysmark is now "nothing" due to AMD and friends leaving. I'd be surprised if 3 years down the road these agencies and corporations using sysmark will have already "switched". For one thing, government and big business just don't move that fast. And for another thing, switch to what? Nobody has offered an alternative (even NV and VIA have not hinted at what companies should be using as a replacement), so nobody in those agencies and corporations are even thinking of switching (switching to what?).
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