Intel hits back at Pentium II benchmark judgement

The offending document is at Tom's Hardware Page, a site dedicated to analysing new motherboards, CPUs and other hardware. In a review of the Pentium II, formerly known by its Klamath codename, Webmaster Tom Pabst suggests that Pentium II will be little faster than Intel's current fastest Pentium Pro chips for graphics and multimedia applications, although it notes that business application performance could be enhanced.

Intel has played down rumours that it attempted to force removal of the data and said today that performance disparities could be down to the version of the CPU tested.

"There have been benchmarks for Pentium II before but they're not necessarily for final version silicon [of Pentium II]," said Chris Hogg, marketing development manager at Intel. "What typically happens is that silicon goes through steppings that add functionality and performance."