Proposal For Open-Source Benchmarks

nd writes: "Van Smith from Tom's Hardware has written a proposal that calls for open source benchmarking. He talks about the need for increasing the objectivity of benchmarking. The proposal is basically to develop a suite of open-source benchmarking tools and new methodologies. It's a rather dramatic column, as he discusses Transmeta, bias towards Intel, among other things. " Well, once you get through the inital umpteen pages of preamble, the generically named A Modest Proposal is the actual point. Interesting idea - but I shall weep for the passing of bogo-MIPs as the definitive measure of system performance. *grin*

Comments

Uhhh....Yeah, but who will use it?

[Bowie J. Poag]

In an industry where hard disks capacities are still measured in 1,000,000 bytes per megabyte, and 19" monitors are still 17.9" viewable, what makes you think that any company would adopt a benchmarking standard that was actually impartial to their product? The whole point of benchmarking your own product is to give the marketing department something to crow about. So, logically, they gear their hardware (and choose their benchmarks) accordingly.

Sure, its a great thing for the rest of us, because we dont have anything we're trying to sell. Just dont expect anyone on the outside to hop on the bandwagon.

Yours In Science,

Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)