Intel keeps up the unethical SDP scam with “new” 4.5W parts

Same BS, new snow job for the public

Intel - logoIntel is back to their normal unethical PR ways with another set of disingenuously fake ‘low power’ SDP numbers. What lowers the bar yet farther is how they did it this time, it shows how little faith the company has in its own BS.

The idea is simple, they are announcing a 4.5W Haswell for fan-less tablets, you know the ones no one is buying because they are fundamentally awful devices. This sounds good on paper until you realize that SDP is in fact a scam that Intel goes out of their way to keep people from understanding. The short version of SDP is that the 4.5W and 6W versions are in fact 11.5W versions that they just cap the power going to. If you take a 130W TDP Xeon and supply it with 6W does that magically make it consume more than 20x less power? Technically yes but there is no semiconductor changes there, just marketing BS. It is still the same part that it was before.

You can tell Intel really doesn’t want anyone asking questions about SDP because the first time they talked about it at CES they wouldn’t even mention that it was the fake SDP numbers rather than the real TDP that they kept mentioning in the keynote. It worked, everyone touted the lower number as a real transistor advance instead of an unethical marketing snow job. This time around they told the press about he new “4.5W” SKUs half an hour before the embargo went up. I am guessing the majority of the press didn’t see the ‘news’ until after the embargo went up, I was sitting in a room with most of Intel’s target audience at the time of the embargo and most didn’t know until I asked them about it.

So Intel is trying surprisingly hard to keep people from asking questions about SDP because the company knows if people actually get educated about it the scam is over. So they give you half an hour or less to write-up the story or be left out. If you aren’t there when the embargo goes up, your competitors get all the page views. If you ask questions you are guaranteed to miss the embargo. If you do your job and get educated about the technical details, your story will never get read. It is a purposefully unethical game to keep the press from doing their job of informing our readers.

The saddest part is that if you look around, it worked. Every site has a story about the new 4.5W Haswell CPUs even if they are not new, not 4.5W, or anything other than a scam. Intel is being blown out of the water in the tablet space and they think a scarce bin Haswell, read expensive, will compete with a <$10 ARM chip. Good luck with that guys, a little more performance than ARM is not going to make Windows 8 suck less, nor will hiding the truth from the public work in the long run. No one wants expensive garbage, and no one is happy when they realize they are being scammed.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate