Intel Responds to Haswell Preview, Says Tom’s Hardware’s Figures are Wrong

Tom’s Hardware’s performance preview, which we summarised yesterday, caught the attention of a lot of people as it has come so far in advance of the Haswell release date believed to be early June. It seems the performance preview also caught the attention of Intel and by the sounds of it they aren’t very happy. Francois Piednoel, Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, said in a public Twitter interaction with Ian Cuttress of Anandtech that Intel did not authorise Tom’s Hardware’s preview and that “we are not happy about it”.

Francois, went on to say that the performance numbers displayed by Tom’s Hardware are not correct. However, Intel also did a similar thing with the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge performance previews and when the reviews actually did come out we actually saw they weren’t all that different – in fact they were more or less the same. So on that basis alone it would seem that Tom’s Hardware’s results are still valid but the fact remains Intel are still unhappy with Tom’s Hardware.

What everyone in the review and technology community now wants to see, is Tom’s Hardware being punished for what is outright NDA breaking and an attempt to monopolise Haswell web-traffic by breaking all the rules of the industry. The culprits who provided TH with a CPU also need to be found, and it is suspected that it can only be a motherboard vendor. HWBot cleverly points out that if you are interested in finding out who provided TH with the leaked engineering sample i7 4770K, then all you have to do is wait until the next Z87 motherboard round-up review and see who win’s the Editor’s Choice Award!

So what to take from all of this? Well it seems likely the results are accurate, but Intel will deny them until launch day because it is company policy, and it seems that Intel is far from happy with TH’s conduct. However, given past trends with big websites breaking NDAs I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they get nothing more than a slap on the wrists and continue with their unprofessional mannerisms.

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