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Examining Benchmarking
VL writes "Benchmarks exist to determine how a particular piece of hardware performs in relation to itself, and to others. Question is, are readers getting the information they really need?"
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Yes... just ask Nvidia and the will provide any information you need :)
I want to know the difference in speed between a dual G5 and a Quad UltraII Sun U80 when compiling Linux targetted to X86.
I don't care if one can get 900fps in Unreal Tournament while the other can only get 880.
As for bias, did you know that my Timex Sinclair is the best computer there that has ever been made or will ever be made? The salesman said so, so it must be true.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Umm, yeah. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem of course applies to any system, regardless of whether "system" defines a set of axiomatic rules or a bunch of PC parts. Of course, we could also say that Heisenberg Uncertainty puts any benchmark into doubt, and if we assign a number to any attribute of the system we cannot then trust other numbers. I know I'm taking some liberty with the applicability of HUT, but hey, why not. Then there's the whole Hilbert Space objections to these arbitrary transforms; without any Kolmogorov-Smirnov test we cannot trust, in the mathematical sense, the reducibility of any Eigenfunction. The Smirnov test is perhaps not ideal; maybe Bacardi-Walker would be better, or at least produce more interesting (in a completely Lanis-Morton sense) results.
1. Aquire your piece of test equipment (video card, motherboard, tower case)
2. Hold the equipment 3 to 5 feet above the bench surface
3. Release. Gravity will take care of the test
4. Measure the mark left in the bench by the equipment. Bigger mark = better equipment.
Of course. But then "PC" may stand for (Twin) Prime Conjecture, versus the more obvious "Personal Computer". In this case, basic statistics (prime normal variation over n-space) dictate that an attribute of a system (here, the benchmark) is an indirect orthogonal vector across the set of L-space primes. GIT, in the limited case, applies to provability of functional equivalence of natural numbers and is directly applicable to this prime normal variation. For example, in The Millenium Problems, Keith Devlin writes how Godel "proved this result by showing how to translate questions about provability to equivalent questions about computability of certain functions" (108). I'm performing something similar here -- restating the original posit in an equivalent manner to highlight the cardinal aspect of GIT.
There's Lies, there's damn Lies and finally there are benchmarks.
Robert
Benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Computer Contradictionary"
Edelstein's First Law of Benchmarks: Every commercial product has its best performance on standard benchmarks.
Edelstein's Corollary: If the system you wanted to win didn't, the benchmark wasn't fair.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
You're benchmarking a piece of hardware against itself?
That should prove to be an interesting technical comparison.
"We were surprised when Hardware A managed to score a 975 on the TurboMaxQuad Doohickey test, but we were shocked when Hardware A blasted out of the gates and scored a whopping 975 on the TurboMaxQuad Doohickey test..."