I recently took delivery of a new laptop. It has a super fast dual processor core. I know this for sure because so much of the marketing around the machine was focused on how wonderful it is to have dual processors whizzing along at all sorts of giddy gigahertz heights.
Now if I had been handed the laptop in some sort of Pepsi challenge I would have no easy way to detect the two processors. I can honestly say that my day-to day experience with the machine gives me no sense of the bottomless computing power the marketing collaterals gushed about.
The marketing isn't wrong of course. It just is not the whole story. End-user impact of extra processors can only be determined when all the other factors are looked at too: RAM, disk contention and so on.
This is not a new problem of course. Finding ways to benchmark databases, transaction processors, CPUs, compilers etc. is an old chestnut.
Back in the early days of the PC revolution we had the Whetstone benchmark. It sprung all sorts of derivatives including Dhrystones. More recently we have TCPP for OLTP benchmarking. Python has Pystones and Linux has BogoMips.
And yet and yet...my problem is that none of these help me assess the true performance of my wee laptop. Again, back in the early days of the PC, there was a community-created ad-hoc benchmark I remember using : Microsoft Flight Simulator. If your PC could run this well -the argument went - you could be sure of reasonable graphics, reasonable number crunching and reasonable compatibility with the original IBM PC.
Today I have less time for cool games and more time for wrangling large word-processor fines and munching 20k line spreadsheets and running hefty IDEs. I would love to be able to point to benchmarks based on, say, OpenOffice performance or Eclipse performance and use these as real-world indications of the true user experience of all that CPU goodness.
Unfortunately, the concept of performance benchmarks - stones - seems to have fallen by the wayside.
It is a concept worth revisiting I think.
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses
By Markus Jakobsson, Zulfikar Ramzan
Published Apr 6, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Symantec Press series.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures
By Peter Thermos, Ari Takanen
Published Aug 1, 2007 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
Hi Sean, There is a
Hi Sean,There is a multitude of different benchmarks available for heavy GUI based applications. Is there one in particular you wish to test (Java Eclipse/Netbeans based, .Net based)? WIth regard to Open Office performance, how difficult is it to write a simple Basic macro in Open Office and time the results?
I suspect the point you were trying to make (and perhaps i missed it here) is that you want some measurable fashion to test multitasking performance. I know very little has really been done in this regard, but if you are still interested google back 3 or 4 years around the time that Intel announced hyper-threading in their Pentium 4 line. Most reviewers (toms hardware, anandtech et al) focussed a lot of their reviewing efforts on the multi tasking benefits.
BTW , I believe video games are still likely to be the best types of applications to test your computer hardware. Write back to me and let me know how your laptop runs Crysis at full settings ;) A modern 2008 (windows) game tests all aspects of your computer infrastructure from raw cpu, memory bandwidth, memory latency, memory capacity, cpu cache sizes, multiple cores, hard drive access and read/write performance, graphics card , sound subsystem. The list goes on. Seriously try running the latest Flight Sim from Microsoft, you will be at 50% cpu utilisation before you even start installing the darned thing... then again... that could just be vista ;)
Karl.