Criticism
The PR system drew heavy criticism. The ratings were based on a limited set of benchmark suites which measured only integer performance, which the K5 and the 6x86 in particular excelled at. Both processors had weak floating-point (FPU) performance, far below that of a Pentium. Many experts argued that this made the PR-rated chips poor choices for games, any kind of streaming video, or encoding MP3 music.
Others took the opposing view that the great majority of users at that time were performing integer-intensive tasks like word-processing, spreadsheeting and web browsing, and the substantially lower cost of the PR-rated processors allowed the user to afford a higher-spec part in any case. The question remains controversial to this day. With the demise of the Cyrix MII (a renamed 6x86MX) from the market in 1999, the PR system appeared to be dead, but AMD revived it in 2001 with the introduction of its Athlon XP line of processors.
Read more about this topic: Performance Rating
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)