By Antony Savaas, 6 July 2007 08:39
NEWS
PC World has escaped punishment from the UK's advertising watchdog after one of its adverts appeared to suggest Intel's dual-core processors performed twice as quickly as single-core processors.
A national press advert for the retailer featured laptops and PCs using Intel's dual-core Core 2 Duo processors. Part of the ad read: "Core 2 Duo twice as fastÂ… Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology with Core 2 Duo processor."
The person who complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), whose name was not revealed, suggested the claim "twice as fast" mistakenly implied the Core 2 Duo would always be twice as fast as a single-core processor. The critic said they understood that, because of shared hardware components, the Core 2 Duo would be no more than 1.7 times faster than a single-core processor.
In response to the complaint, PC World said the laptop advertised used Intel Core 2 Duo and Centrino technology. The retailer pointed out that the text "twice as fast" was linked to a footnote that explained the claim was based on benchmarking against the performance of previous generation Intel Centrino chipset technology, and readers could learn more by visiting the Intel website.
The footnote in the advert read: "Based on multitasking benchmarking against previous-generation Centrino. See www.intel.com for details."
PC World said it therefore disagreed with the assertion that the advert implied Core 2 Duo technology would always be twice as fast as a single-core processor because it was not being compared with a single-core processor.
The retailer said the claim "twice as fast" originated from Intel itself and it sent the ASA a sample of benchmarking data. It argued it was reasonable to compare the performance of the current technology against that of the product's well-known and immediate predecessor. PC World said it was not currently using the claim but would like to do so in the future.
In its ruling, the ASA rejected the complaint and said no further action was needed. It noted the claim's footnote made it clear the statement referred to the performance of Core 2 Duo technology against previous-generation Centrino technology.
The ASA said: "We acknowledged that the ad made clear the basis for the 'twice as fast' claim and where readers could find out more information about that. We concluded that the ad was unlikely to mislead."
It is not the first time PC World has found itself the subject of ASA complaints. Previous disputes have covered issues such as laptop sale prices and wireless-access technology speeds but this is the first time dual-core processors have been involved.
Antony Savvas writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. anonymous
A 2 core processor running 3GHz per core will be faster than a single core running at 3GHz. Some applications that are capable of using both cores at the same time will actually run twice as quick. However there are very few programs that can use 2 cores at the same time.
What actually makes these PC's quicker is the increased bus speed and increased memory speed. Faster disks help as well.
If you were to put a 2 core processor in a PC with a slow bus and memory then you would hardly have any speed increase.
2. Joe Whitehead
In other words, if they share the same bus, then they'll be considerably less than 2x as fast. Give them seperate RAM, seperate PCI-E video cards, and load a game, scientific application, or the like, that knows how to split the load correctly, and surprise - it's more than 2x faster! The major rise in efficiency in the latter case is because the single-CPU system has to deal with the latency of having 2 or more intense threads trying to use the same resources. An analogy is having a 1Gb LAN and trying to get 90% out of a single connection between 2 PCs, and trying to get even close to that out of 50 paths. The collisions will slow it down quite a bit! It should be obvious that having a 2nd path would decrease latency on the higher-sensitive applications.