Benchmark (computing): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:08, 6 June 2021

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Benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system. Synthetic benchmarks do this by specially created programs that impose the workload on the component. Application benchmarks run real-world programs on the system. While application benchmarks usually give a much better measure of real-world performance on a given system, synthetic benchmarks are useful for testing individual components, like a [[hard disk]] or networking device.

Benchmarks are particularly important in [[CPU design]], giving processor architects the ability to measure and make tradeoffs in [[microarchitecture|microarchitecturemicroarchitectural]] decisions. For example, if a benchmark extracts the key [[algorithms]] of an application, it will contain the performance-sensitive aspects of that application. Running this much smaller snippet on a cycle-accurate simulator can give clues on how to improve performance.

Prior to 2000, computer and microprocessor architects used [[SPEC]] to do this, although SPEC's Unix-based benchmarks were quite lengthy and thus unwieldy to use intact.