Lies, Statistics, and Benchmarks

“Since the second computer was built, users have compared the performance of different computers. Performance matters. Sometimes, a performance difference is just a question of whether a job will be done sooner or later; in other cases, a performance difference might prevent a job from being done at all. Measuring performance of a particular task is not too daunting, but developing a prediction of how quickly other tasks will run can be nigh impossible. A benchmark is a task designed such that a measure of performance on this particular task will be a good proxy for performance across a wide variety of tasks.”

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  1. 2006-05-25 4:38 pm
  2. 2006-05-25 5:18 pm
    • 2006-05-25 6:01 pm