“In today’s hyper-connected world, technology buyers can find an answer to almost any question with a web browser and an internet connection. We can all do a little research before we sign the check or hand over the credit card. In the personal computer market, performance benchmarking has been an important part of evaluating computers for years, but what do benchmarks really tell us and which ones can we rely on? History shows the way computers have been evaluated continually changes. For decades computers were primarily sold on the basis of the clock frequency of its processor.
AMD was, in fact, the first processor company to 1 GHz in 2000, but as the frequencies rose higher and more architectural differences were introduced, the link between clock frequency and performance experienced by the user became increasingly tenuous. Additionally, increases in power consumption and decreases in performance scaling with clock speed ultimately killed clock speed as a performance measurement. Microprocessor core counts became the next marketable way many mainstream users were sold computers, with AMD demonstrating the first x86 dual-core processor in 2004 and the first native quad-core x86 server processor in 2006. Benchmarks were developed to help take the guess work out of how much frequency or core counts really deliver in terms of performance, and to provide objective guidance from parties outside of the hardware ecosystem itself. As these software companies maneuvered to become the gold standard of benchmarking against each other, cracks in the model began to appear with hardware companies fighting for optimizations to achieve the highest score resulting in diminished credibility of frequency as a measure of performance. As processor architectures have evolved, some benchmark suites have not evolved with them; yet they remain a staple to decision makers when judging the performance of computers.
