During IFA Berlin, Intel’s marketing department released a slide deck that didn’t sit well with AMD fans and others in the hardware community. Some of the more controversial slides implied that Ryzen’s Cinebench benchmarks were dishonest and not indicative of real-world usage because Maxon’s Cinema 4D suite was only relevant to .22% of users.
der8auer and Hardware Unboxed have pointed out how ridiculous and misleading this figure is because it actually came from Intel’s own “Software Improvement Program” poll, which queried only notebook and tablet users. This is laughable, being that Cinebench 4D is usually run on high-powered desktops.
Intel’s Chief Performance Strategist Ryan Shrout has taken to Medium to defend himself. According to Shrout, that portion of the presentation had nothing to do with desktop and only concerned mobile. He did apologize to Roman Hartung (der8auer), Guru3D, and PC Perspective for using their story items to trash AMD without a heads-up, however.
Something that I simply didn’t think about before the slides for the event were posted publicly was how much of the discussion, context, and transitions between topics were handled through voice over. Press that weren’t in attendance (or the enthusiast community that looked at the slides separately) didn’t have that advantage, and as such, some of the ideas could be misconstrued or taken out of context.