What Makes a Valid Benchmark?

An anonymous reader writes "Benchmarks can make a big difference if they are accurate in predicting performance. That's simple enough to describe; it's not nearly so simple to implement. Benchmarks can be an excellent tool for predicting performance and estimating requirements, but they also can be misleading, possibly catastrophically so. This article looks at benchmarks; the good, the bad and the ugly."

Comments

The Best Benchmarks Lead

[Jherek Carnelian]

The best benchmarks are those that lead their respective industries.

As manufacturers seek to maximize benchmark scores, they end up improving their products in ways that make the product more useful to the consumers.

One example of a bad benchmark: For the longest time, cpu frequency has been a sort of benchmark easily understood by the buying public. But it was a very poor one, leading Intel to maximize cpu frequency at the cost of almost all else -- actual computational performance fell behind, power efficiency became even worse with chips becoming mini-furnaces.