Benchmark (computing)

Benchmarks are particularly important in CPU design, giving processor architects the ability to measure and make tradeoffs in microarchitectural decisions.

Running this much smaller snippet on a cycle-accurate simulator can give clues on how to improve performance.

Computer manufacturers are known to configure their systems to give unrealistically high performance on benchmark tests that are not replicated in real usage.

However, such a transformation was rarely useful outside the benchmark until the mid-1990s, when RISC and VLIW architectures emphasized the importance of compiler technology as it related to performance.

Nevertheless, CPUs with many execution units often complete real-world and benchmark tasks in less time than the supposedly faster high-clock-rate CPU.

Features of benchmarking software may include recording/exporting the course of performance to a spreadsheet file, visualization such as drawing line graphs or color-coded tiles, and pausing the process to be able to resume without having to start over.

[3] Benchmarking is not easy and often involves several iterative rounds in order to arrive at predictable, useful conclusions.

A graphical demo running as a benchmark of the OGRE engine