Dictionary of Computers - benchmark

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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.

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