It has surfaced that a white paper published by Aberdeen Group, trashing AMD for the misleading use of the (P)erformance (R)ating, was financed by Intel. A further error in the design of the paper was that at no point did any Aberdeen Group researcher call AMD in order to ask their opinion.
The paper pounded AMD's decision to use PR as "taking a step down a slippery slope of bad science." It went on to claim that the PR was the "Pinocchio Factor". Using the example of the XP 2000+, which runs at 1.667GHz, Aberdeen state that it claims to be equivalent to Intel's Pentium 4 2GHz Willamette core. According to the report however, that is no longer the case since the Northwood core has brought about performance enhancements.
Aberdeen also hit AMD over benchmarking methods claiming that AMD tactics "strike at the very nature of benchmark fairness".
Intel have long claimed a complete lack of interest in what their rivals do. Recent moves however, suggest that they are listening. Intel's frustration over AMD's recent PR campaign has been expressed in various ways. First there is the obvious acceptance of the PR rating since Intel prices its Pentium 4 processors accordingly, then there was the recent release of a PDF document criticizing AMD's PR choice. Finally, this white paper seems to show that Intell are getting desperate.
There are many ways Intel could fight AMD in a more straight-forward fashion, unfortunately this report seems more like a blunder than a well-thought out plan.