"You will recall that AMD dubbed its model number-based rating system, upon its introduction with the Athlon XP, a "bridge metric." The company pledged to replace the system with a more robust set of performance metrics to be produced by its True Performance Initiative, or TPI.

We decided to hold AMD to this promise, and thus I had a conversation with AMD’s TPI director, Hal Speed, back in December ‘02. He said at that time that TPI was still on track for early ‘03, with lots of new partners and new momentum backing the effort. However, 2003 came and went—as did the launches of AMD’s Opteron and Athlon 64 processors—with nary a peep about TPI’s new performance metric.

Here’s the kicker. The True Performance Initiative will not produce a performance metric."