Dictionary of Computers - benchmark

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Measure of the performance of a piece of equipment or software, usually consisting of a standard program or suite of programs. Benchmarks can indicate whether a computer is powerful enough to perform a particular task, and so enable machines to be compared. However, they provide only a very rough guide to practical performance, and may lead manufacturers to design systems that get high scores with the artificial benchmark programs but do not necessarily perform well with day-to-day programs or data.

Benchmark measures include Whetstones, Dhrystones, SPECmarks, and TPC. SPECmarks are based on ten programs adopted by the Systems Performance Evaluation Cooperative for benchmarking workstations; the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-B benchmark is used to test databases and online systems in banking (debit/credit) environments.

The pan-African colours express African unity. Effective date: 1 August 1990. >>