Intel 9th Gen Paid Benchmarks Take Advantage of NDA Periods

[Carclis]

1 hour ago, MMKing said:

I've not read a games review in years. And from now on, i won't trust a tech review unless the journalist can with absolute certainty prove that not even an NDA agreement was signed. I don't care much for day 1 reviews anyway, i'm happy to wait until the product, which was paid for by the reviewer, has been shipped. With these recent reveals, the consumers should be even more strict than we have been in the past.

 

Free sample - Not ok

Paid sample ahead of time - Not ok

 

I don't care how sincere the tech press may be, or how much they insist that they are independent. A select few ''journalists'' and the actions of certain companies, have ensured that my standards have reached levels that some may describe as unreasonable.

I think that's perfectly reasonable and understandable. It sounds like you just place a high degree of importance on doing proper research on things that you spend your money on. I myself go by the more independent sources who are in the industry for the passion as opposed to money. For games I'll usually look towards Jim Sterling although his opinion is not the be all and end all by any means. For tech I've found Steve Walton of HardwareUnboxed/TechSpot to have the most extensive reviews that are unmatched by any, with Steve of Gamers Nexus being my next trusted source, especially for more technical information.

 

1 hour ago, ZacoAttaco said:

I wasn't aware IGN had a noticeable difference in release times for their reviews, then again I try and stay away from IGN for the most part.

I wouldn't say IGN specifically, more so the majority of the gaming journalists. Only few people actually receive review samples (the ones that reliably give positive reviews) and the ones that do don't have to wait until release day to get a review copy.

[sof006]

TL:DR

 

To sum up, don't buy because benchmarks are very misleading. Wait for Linus, Gamers Nexus, Jay etc to benchmark them.

[mrthuvi]

2 hours ago, sof006 said:

TL:DR

 

To sum up, don't buy because benchmarks are very misleading. Wait for Linus, Gamers Nexus, Jay etc to benchmark them.

Even without benchmark, we can get a fairly educated guess of what the performance's gonna be like. 30% faster in multi-threaded workload compared to 8700k. Marginally better or tied with 8700k in gaming. It's for people who want BOTH single and multi-threaded performance AND willing to pay the hefty price premium (partially due to intel's supply problem). It's not some new magic tech, it's the same architecture since the 3-year-old skylake, just with moar cores. 

[GoldenLag]

23 minutes ago, mrthuvi said:

(partially due to intel's supply problem).

Isnt the current pricing disregarding 14nm supply issues? This is MSRP afterall. We might end up with a Vega situation where the best price is and was launch price

[mrthuvi]

19 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Isnt the current pricing disregarding 14nm supply issues? This is MSRP afterall. We might end up with a Vega situation where the best price is and was launch price

I think Intel has to incorporate some of the supply issue into the pricing. We know generally R&D is going up not down, larger die is more expensive, soldering is more expensive. With the supply issue, intel is gonna make fewer of these so they have to have a higher margin per unit to make up for it. All of this is just pure speculation btw. 

 

And they will get sold out cos there are not enough of them so retailers will jump on it and jack up the price further so it might go down the vega path after all. 

[Syntaxvgm]

6 hours ago, Carclis said:

I'm not sure if this remark is poking fun at the state of the industry or genuinely unaware that it's asically already happening.

It's mostly poking fun at the industry and bankrolled reviews, but I'm not aware of NDA abuses in this nature. Usually it's people just not getting early review samples that I see being abused. 

[bowrilla]

2 hours ago, GoldenLag said:

Isnt the current pricing disregarding 14nm supply issues? This is MSRP afterall. We might end up with a Vega situation where the best price is and was launch price

The published price of $489 is for batches of 1000 CPUs by the way. Regular preorders at newegg come at $579. You can expect the 9900k to stay at those levels or even rising in prices. These are HEDT prices on a consumer platform without the benefits of HEDT. And Intel was obviously aware of the mediocre performance gains especially in games. That's why they planned this marketing stunt in the first place. 

 

After watching Steve's second video on that topic interviewing one of the founders of Principled Technologies I wonder if they could actually mess up benchmarks that hard because of a lack of knowledge or because they know what these benchmarks were intended for. If you're in the game for years and years you can't mess up that hard by accident. Wrong timings, unneccessary amounts of memory harming Ryzen results, wrong settings in Ryzen Master … this is either incompetence (at least of the employees who did the testing) or willingly playing along in a merketing stunt screwing less knowledgable customers. Imho they were already out of business if they didn't know better how to actually benchmark cpus so it was on purpose. Why would Intel do this? Because they know AMD has a strong competitor on the market that might not surpass them in maximum performance but definitely in performance per dollar. Looking at X299 last year (which was a godawful mess of a launch) and now this marketing stunt – yep, Intel feels the pressure and feels the need to rig the game. Without their production issues and resulting low availability prices would have been lower, they wouldn't have been forced to invest billions. If that 990k were like $400-450 there wouldn't be an issue. 

[SupremeGOAT]

On 10/10/2018 at 8:04 AM, Syntaxvgm said:

Wow this is a good tactic. 

I'm surprised EA or activision-blizzard don't have IGN release their paid review of their games while other reviewers are still under NDA.  

never underestimate EA... Throughout it's existence, this planet bore witness to every atrocity mankind violently branded into it's skull. These vile actions were not by the will of man, no... The transcendental darkness that predates the anthropocene era flung itself upon early man and started spreading like a cancer...promoting microtransactions and season passes...loot boxes and always online DRMs... then calling people stupid... re-releasing the same sports games year after year then calling their fans stupid for criticizing them... this Evil Association finds new ways to corrupt and drain the souls of men... if we underestimate them the war is already lost.. oh and intel is full of it!

[Syntaxvgm]

5 minutes ago, SupremeGOAT said:

never underestimate EA... Throughout it's existence, this planet bore witness to every atrocity mankind violently branded into it's skull. These vile actions were not by the will of man, no... The transcendental darkness that predates the anthropocene era flung itself upon early man and started spreading like a cancer...promoting microtransactions and season passes...loot boxes and always online DRMs... then calling people stupid... re-releasing the same sports games year after year then calling their fans stupid for criticizing them... this Evil Association finds new ways to corrupt and drain the souls of men... if we underestimate them the war is already lost.. oh and intel is full of it!

[toor]

Finally had time to watch it too (second part -

 

Was really, really not expecting it to go that badly.   I don't think they were malicious but their methodology was... bad.  They (at lest their CEO) were completely unprepared for even basic questions.   I wouldn't have provided the technical answers GN did quite yet, rather give them a chance to go back and retest.  Essentially GN gave them some of the best 45 minutes of consulting in the industry, for free.   Still can't get over not only did they not use the right cooler but had NO IDEA.

 

Did Intel know PI was in over their head but needed a fallguy?   Whole thing stinks.

[Unixsystem]

5 hours ago, toor said:

Was really, really not expecting it to go that badly.

The most offensive bit to me is the fact that he had the balls to say things like "we've been in this industry for years" and "I've been doing this since before you were born." 

 

At this point any reputation they had is done for, but at the very least they could have owned up and said "look, we were in a rush and we obviously didn't do our due diligence. We are working on ironing out our testing using suggestions from the community and other outlets, and we ask that you give us time to put out a proper, updated set of benchmarks."

 

Instead he admitted to a couple minor mistakes but otherwise doubled down on all of the awful decisions his company made, and tried to act as if GN was somehow in the wrong because he had only been on the scene for a mere decade. 

[Inelastic]

6 hours ago, toor said:

Finally had time to watch it too (second part -

 

Was really, really not expecting it to go that badly.   I don't think they were malicious but their methodology was... bad.  They (at lest their CEO) were completely unprepared for even basic questions.   I wouldn't have provided the technical answers GN did quite yet, rather give them a chance to go back and retest.  Essentially GN gave them some of the best 45 minutes of consulting in the industry, for free.   Still can't get over not only did they not use the right cooler but had NO IDEA.

 

Did Intel know PI was in over their head but needed a fallguy?   Whole thing stinks.

I can understand the CEO not knowing those detailed questions he couldn't answer. It's not his job to know those type of details, that's what he pays his workers for and he trusts that they'll get it right. Finding the right cooler is below his pay grade. He even prefaced the interview with that. But, his employees should have known. I'm sure he chewed them out for that afterwards.

[kirashi]

On 10/9/2018 at 4:32 PM, Fooshi said:

Oh wow, Intel being scummy shits again. Who'd have thought?

 

Just stop buying Intel. It's literally immoral.

I mean, on that note, one should not purchase anything from any large corporation, and instead should make it themselves if they really want to stick within moral grounds... But I get what you're saying here. Companies need to stop being deceptive in any marketing if they want to be painted in a positive light.

 

Also, when does the police assault end? Kinda need to know when Bain is sending the van back to pick us up... better be before Chains gets in a pickle again too, otherwise we're going to be stuck here and have to fend off more Cloackers teleporting mid-kick into the side of our faces.

[Curufinwe_wins]

This is beyond stupid at this point. And the flame wars are ludicrous.

 

Honest question here... Why isnt anyone wondering why Ryzen 7 has the option to enable a feature called "Game Mode" in the first place when it neuters that cpus gaming performance? Are you honestly going to tell me that AMD is so stupid and incompetent they cant check against CPU ID and grey out or warn users when on chips it isnt designed for? 

 

Does anyone seem to remember AMD marketing bulldozer for 5 years as the fastest cpus available (highest clock speed), and for 7 years the only consumer 8 core chips? The 9590 released for 920 dollars!!! And it wasn't even good when it came out. Let alone actually leading in basically everything south of HEDT.

 

Seriously guys. Its prerelease marketing crap. Toss it out instantly. We all know this is literally always true. Hawaii, RTX, Pentium 4, Bulldozer, ARM v9, Itanium, A12.

 

If you want to be mad, be mad, but you can't honestly both be mindful of the business practices of the industry when it comes to marketing like this, and pretend Intel is "the singular immoral one." 

 

Personally... I think AMDs marketing of Bulldozer (and derivatives) and Intels marketing of P4, which were both sustained, anti-consumer, misleading intiatives of many years, are dramatically more unethical and repulsive than any of these launch day shenanigans. 

[Carclis]

1 minute ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Honest question here... Why isnt anyone wondering why Ryzen 7 has the option to enable a feature called "Game Mode" in the first place when it neuters that cpus gaming performance? Are you honestly going to tell me that AMD is so stupid and incompetent they cant check against CPU ID and grey out or warn users when on chips it isnt designed for?  

Game mode provides a benefit to games that do not utilise more than a couple of threads as well of those that receive a larger than usual performance hit when the load is spread across different CCX's.

3 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

If you want to be mad, be mad, but you can't honestly both be mindful of the business practices of the industry when it comes to marketing like this, and pretend Intel is "the immoral ones."

The company Pincipled Technology claims to have been in the industry since before Steve Burke was born, so probably 30 years or more. The real problem is that a company that has been in the industry is incapable of doing benchmarks properly or is less familiar with it than the average gamer/consumer (the people they're supposedly doing performance testing for). Either that or Intel has forced them to use game mode to inflate it's own numbers.

[Curufinwe_wins]

11 minutes ago, Carclis said:

Game mode provides a benefit to games that do not utilise more than a couple of threads as well of those that receive a larger than usual performance hit when the load is spread across different CCX's.

The company Pincipled Technology claims to have been in the industry since before Steve Burke was born, so probably 30 years or more. The real problem is that a company that has been in the industry is incapable of doing benchmarks properly or is less familiar with it than the average gamer/consumer (the people they're supposedly doing performance testing for). Either that or Intel has forced them to use game mode to inflate it's own numbers.

Look at the full comparison for Ryzen default vs game mode. Not a single case does it make a positive difference past margin of error. It is designed for TR. It matters for TR. It should never have been allowed for Ryzen, and is further indicative of actual consumer focused misleading, or... sloppy/incompetent design.

 

A company that has done marketing reviews for 30 years is not a company that has done modern gaming reviews for 30 years. Modern gaming reviews, and how to properly control systems and not generate trash benchmarks is even a fairly recent development. We still are weeding through reviewers that use bad statistics and poor similarity.

 

It's actually ridiculous to assume that someone would understand implicitly that such a feature shouldn't be enabled without very recent prior knowledge. Obviously intel and AMD even could have given them it, but why would they. Intel can accurately claim they validated the results (for the given settings).

 

The average gamer and consumer wouldnt know any better either. I still... to this day... have friends using Bulldozer cpus because they are "faster 8 cores" than Intel i7s. Ffs.

[Carclis]

5 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Look at the full comparison for Ryzen default vs game mode. Not a single case does it make a positive difference past margin of error. It is designed for TR. It matters for TR. It should never have been allowed for Ryzen, and is further indicative of actual consumer focused misleading. 

Do you have a comparison to show me? Personally I agree that game mode is not great, but only because it requires a restart in order to enable making it completely impractical.

7 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

A company that has done technology markering reviews for 30 years is not a company that has done modern gaming reviews for 30 years. It's actually ridiculous to assume that someone would understand implicitly that such a feature shouldn't be enabled without massive prior knowledge. Obviously intel and AMD even could have given them it, but why would they. Intel can accurately claim they validated the results (for the given settings).

They do white papers and benchmarking and get paid to do it. They better bloody well know the products otherwise you end up with shitty benchmarks like we have here. They're honestly the most poorly conducted and flawed benchmarks I've ever seen. How can you claim to be testing performance for the average consumer and test performance using 64GB of RAM? Why would you use four dimms in your test setup across both consumer and enthusiast platforms that support quad-channel memory and why would you have different RAM speeds? Do they know anything about scientific testing?

[Curufinwe_wins]

55 minutes ago, Carclis said:

Snip

Steve shows the results going through quickly with the same setup results all the way around. It shows why it exists for TR, and why it never should exist for Ryzen 3/5/7. 

 

 

Testing with any TR processor is not for average consumer. Same with the skylake-x chips. LTT, Jay, Kyle, Hardware Canucks to name a few are all abhorrently bad at scientific testing, controls, and validation. We all know this, Jay and LTT at least embrace it and give a 'college try' from time to time. Hell HC just had to post a follow-up video basically retracting their previous original review because they are too stubborn to think before posting dramatically different cooling solutions in two generations of products as valid comparisons on the representative performance difference between them. Even though they have been called out for years about it. Many tech reviewers only review at officially supported memory clocks, even though that is stupid and non-representative of actual differences in IMC or performance of reasonable real life memory kits. The official AMD Ryzen testing comparison against Intel didn't use memory of similar configuration OR speed when it launched, and THEY KNEW what a difference it could have made for their own product.

 

I think you vastly overestimate the lowest common denominator in true scientific experimentation and those that pay lip service to it. Personally, I don't see this as particularly odd. In fact, I was very pleased to see the rigorous attempt to document as much detail as reasonably possible about the testing process, so that we can be in this position in the first place. We can repeat the testing apparatus and validate (validation referring, in this case, to agreement given stated priors of the experimental design) the results. We can compare it against testing apparati that we believe to be more representative, and explain why.

 

I am myself a published author of a number of scientific papers, and reader/editor (obviously) of many times more of them (in a slightly narcissistic plug, one of my papers is being published in Nature the 18th). I would give a great deal to be able to have the same level of detail on such design as shown by this white-paper in a number of the references I have relied on in the past.

 

 

 

IE: My personally most frustrating one being an otherwise beautiful seminal paper (authored by one of the leading experts in the field) that stated gas compositions that were simply un-physical at the experimental conditions which completely rendered both validity and applicability to any proper followup paper null and void. Realistically, the issue was they only measured at RT conditions, and failed to realize that the fluid composition was thermdynamically unstable at operating conditions, and highly kinetically active as well. Thus they don't know and never found out what their operating condition actually was, and both their calculations, and many other papers (my own included) showed that ppm level impurities showed dramatic mechanism changes.

 

 

EDIT: TLDR Hanlon's razor (as an extension/corollary of Occam's razor) should be applied to this case. The tightest, least complex solution spaces are that in which PT simply doesn't know/realize/conceive better. 

 

Another example: until very recently it was generally accepted truth that for dGPU gaming, ram speed doesnt matter. This evidence being generally supported by fantastic reviews on various DDR3-supporting platforms by Anand and the like and even shown to be broadly true on Haswell-E. Now current testing (primarily focused on Broadwell+/Zen+ both with DDR4 subsystems) has shown that it does, but being a couple of years out of date on the latest research is certainly not unexpected for many actual experts in various fields (good luck finding many doctors of 30 years not woefully out of date), let alone a firm that does "fact-driven" marketing consulting.

 

EDIT3: Sorry for the rant. It's a bit of a personal frustration point on many levels actually. I am a nuclear engineer by education you see, and dealing with ignorance (similar to and exceeding that of this white paper) on a daily basis from all sorts of 'experts' or researchers studing on the periphery of my field is a giant pet peeve.

[LinusTech]

6 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

(SNIP)

Aaarrrrgh!! HANLON'S RAZOR!! That's the one I've been trying to remember when I was talking about this! I forgot what it was called!

 

Thanks

 

Linus

[Curufinwe_wins]

28 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

Aaarrrrgh!! HANLON'S RAZOR!! That's the one I've been trying to remember when I was talking about this! I forgot what it was called!

 

Thanks

 

Linus

How I personally envision this sort of situation internally, with minor flavoring:

 

Intel Eng: We need independent validation of our amazing new achievement.

 

Intel PR: Hey PT, you guys sound professional and intelligent. We need you to review this product against our older stuff and our competitions stuff. Btw we already know it's the best ever, just fyi. Contact us for more info.

 

PT Mgmnt: Ok great, I'll have someone get on this quickly.

 

PT Lackey: hmmm... uhh...  things... game mode.... supported ram capacity... speed... oh hey this one comes with a cooler! **Poops out report under staffed and with insufficient time/motivation for detailed research**

 

PT Mgmnt: Intel, wow your product really is the best. Nice work. We have full confidence in our staff here and are always glad to be of service (for the right price).

 

Intel PR: Wow this looks great! Yo Eng, does this check out? It better cause it will totally help sell the narrative.

 

Intel Eng: Well it's not wrong.... but it's pretty dumb **writes detailed response on methodology**

 

Intel PR: So it's good right? The results are repeatable? We would hate for a lawsuit on false advertising to reflect poorly on your performance targets.

 

Intel Eng: Yes... but...

 

Intel PR: Good. Now go away and let the real professionals work.

[LinusTech]

6 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

How I personally envision this sort of situation internally, with minor flavoring:

 

Intel Eng: We need independent validation of our amazing new achievement.

 

Intel PR: Hey PT, you guys sound professional and intelligent. We need you to review this product against our older stuff and our competitions stuff. Btw we already know it's the best ever, just fyi. Contact us for more info.

 

PT Mgmnt: Ok great, I'll have someone get on this quickly.

 

PT Lackey: hmmm... uhh...  things... game mode.... supported ram capacity... speed... oh hey this one comes with a cooler! **Poops out report under staffed and with insufficient time for detailed research**

 

PT Mgmnt: Intel, wow your product really is the best. Nice work. We have full confidence in our staff here and are always willing to help (for the right price).

 

Intel PR: Wow this looks great! Yo Eng, does this check out? It better cause it will totally help sell the narrative.

 

Intel Eng: Well it's not wrong.... but it's pretty dumb **writes detailed response on methodology**

 

Intel PR: So it's good right? The results are repeatable? We would hate for a lawsuit on false advertising to reflect poorly on your performance targets.

 

Intel Eng: Yes... but...

 

Intel PR: Good. Now go away and let the real professionals work.

DID YOU READ MY COMMENT ON YOUTUBE??? LOL

 

 

I like you. You sound like you have actual experience navigating the corporate world.

 

It's amazing how much analysis of these kinds of things gets done by people who have NO idea how things work at a large organization like Intel.

 

I'm sure legal is freaking out right now and everyone else is out drinking. It IS Friday night, afterall

[ZacoAttaco]

32 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

Aaarrrrgh!! HANLON'S RAZOR!! That's the one I've been trying to remember when I was talking about this! I forgot what it was called!

 

 Thanks

 

Linus

Does this apply to the Google Assistant team?? 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Look at the full comparison for Ryzen default vs game mode. Not a single case does it make a positive difference past margin of error.

I'm not sure what you read but there were multiple games far, very far, above margin of error difference in the PT updated document. I haven't gone and read a more trusted source to see what they got because well, game mode on for Ryzen is that stupid and by now I just don't actually care heh.

 

I know in a lot of cases the difference isn't huge but when it is it effects performance just as much as for TR without it on, and those wildly inaccurate and not realistic performance numbers were picked as headline numbers for marketing by Intel to show just how great their product was.

 

What actually got so many people angry about this was that this commissioned test became or was allowed to become public before other 3rd party independent reviews were and was being passed off as just that when that's not actually the case. I don't know exactly who is mostly to blame for that but PCGamesN should never have published an article on it like they did in it's original form.

 

I get that it should really be ignored but this isn't like all the other marketing fluff presented during product launch in how it was presented and how it was reported on. It is generally known that numbers on a direct launch presentation and accompanying documents are to be ignored but the way the PT report came out to the public was not all that similar hence the confusion. 

 

Had no one raised any objections to the test data you can bet more tech news sites would have followed suit and publish similar articles and would have resulted in all likelihood systemic misinformation about the products for a good number of days past actual independent reviews, that's one of the big problems with inaccurate information is it doesn't just go away once shown as that.

 

Like you I can appreciate how well documented their procedure was but unfortunately when it comes down to it, and what matters the most to the interest public, it was flawed. In this particular sphere I would actually take a more poorly documented report that is correct over a well documented incorrect one, how you show the poorly documented one as correct is harder of course and that is just not something generally appreciated by the general gamer.

[Curufinwe_wins]

23 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

DID YOU READ MY COMMENT ON YOUTUBE??? LOL

 

 

I like you. You sound like you have actual experience navigating the corporate world.

 

It's amazing how much analysis of these kinds of things gets done by people who have NO idea how things work at a large organization like Intel.

 

I'm sure legal is freaking out right now and everyone else is out drinking. It IS Friday night, afterall

I actually didn't see it! That is very amusing!

 

Not as much experience with large corporations, but I have spent too much time working for/with governmental institutions on grants and such.  People are people.

 

I mean, that was mostly channeled from some side-experiments shoved on me years ago as a grad student researcher lol.

[Carclis]

49 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Steve shows the results going through quickly with the same setup results all the way around. It shows why it exists for TR, and why it never should exist for Ryzen 3/5/7.

Fair enough. There are a couple of results that improve under Game Mode but I'd say it's too inconsistent and impractical to be a viable solution.

50 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Testing with any TR processor is not for average consumer. Same with the skylake-x chips. LTT, Jay, Kyle, Hardware Canucks to name a few are all abhorrently bad at scientific testing, controls, and validation. We all know this, Jay and LTT at least embrace it and give a 'college try' from time to time. Hell HC just had to post a follow-up video basically retracting their previous original review because they are too stubborn to think before posting dramatically different cooling solutions in two generations of products as valid comparisons on the representative performance difference between them. Even though they have been called out for years about it. Many tech reviewers only review at officially supported memory clocks, even though that is stupid and non-representative of actual differences in IMC or performance of reasonable real life memory kits. The official AMD Ryzen testing comparison against Intel didn't use memory of similar configuration OR speed when it launched, and THEY KNEW what a difference it could have made for their own product.

I'm just stating the rationale they provided when they chose to go with a 64GB configuration. The person Steve spoke to seemed genuinely surprised that the average consumer did not use a configuration like that, or even that 32GB was not very common. The logical move would have been to opt for two dimms for a dual channel CPU and four for a quad channel one. I agree that others such as Jay and HC are not exactly the beacons of high standard testing but then again, they don't get paid to write white papers either, and they generally communicate with each other to see if the results they are getting are reasonable.That's actually a big point. Ryzen has been out for around 18 months now so PT has plenty of material to look at to get an idea of where their results should be between. It's kinda surprising to me that at no point they ever thought " hey our Ryzen results are worse than everybody elses, maybe we should retest them".

51 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Another example: until very recently it was generally accepted truth that for dGPU gaming, ram speed doesnt matter. This evidence being generally supported by fantastic reviews on various DDR3-supporting platforms by Anand and the like and even shown to be broadly true on Haswell-E. Now current testing (primarily focused on Broadwell+/Zen+ both with DDR4 subsystems) has shown that it does, but being a couple of years out of date on the latest research is certainly not unexpected for many actual experts in various fields (good luck finding many doctors of 30 years not woefully out of date), let alone a firm that does "fact-driven" marketing consulting.

But the thing is you cannot expect to have relevant knowledge to the tech industry if you don't keep up to date. Anyone that has been alive for 20 years could tell you that. If you want to call yourself an expert on something, especially technology you better do your research, or test the products that you were supposed to in your benchmarks instead of just thinking "this setting sounds right".