Intel settles law suit over Pentium 4 performance

A law suit revolving around the first-generation Pentium 4 processor (Willamette) sold between November 20, 2000 and June 30, 2002 demonstrates how incredibly slow justice is in this country and how some corporations can get carried away with their marketing. Here is a snip-it from a story by Pulkit Chandna in the most recent MaximumPC magazine describing the situation:

…. Intel has finally agreed to settle a decade-long class action lawsuit, which alleges that when confronted by “pervasive design flaws” and “dismal” performance scores in the lead up to the launch of first-gen Pentium 4 chips, the company resorted to greatly exaggerating their capabilities through cooked-up numbers. Even though the new chips were, in reality, no match for some of the existing Pentium III models, let alone Athlon processors from rival AMD, the lawsuit alleges that the fabricated benchmarks were enough to convince the marketplace to move to Pentium 4.

The class action complaint against Intel and HP states that “Intel used its enormous resources and influence in the computing industry to, in Intel’s own words, ‘falsely improve’ the Pentium 4’s performance scores. It secretly wrote benchmark tests that would give the Pentium 4 higher scores, then released and marketed these ‘new’ benchmarks to performance reviewers as ‘independent third-party’ benchmarks.”

All members of the class are entitled to a princely cash reimbursement of $15. You can check out the Intel Pentium 4 Settlement web site to see if you qualify.