Benchmarks as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
982 words · ~4 min read
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life used to be so simple when we wanted to know how computer a compared to
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computer B all we had to do was look at the little tag under it and if you know
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number a was 20% more than number B we knew that give or take computer a was
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going to be 20% faster than computer B but then as architectural designs of
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different processors diverged and a CPU
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that ran at 2 GHz could suddenly be as fast at performing a given real world
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task is another one that ran at 3 GHz we needed a new way to measure performance
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benchmarks no I'm not talking about those kinds of benchmarks I'm talking
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about software programs designed to evaluate the performance of PC
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components or complete systems they fall into two main categories the first main
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type is synthetic benchmarks examples of these include ID to 64's cach and memory
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speed testing module and super pie a small lightweight program that tests how
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quickly a processor can calculate pi to
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a predetermined number of decimal places now synthetic benchmarks are great for
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certain things because their creators are focused on obtaining results with
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maximum repeatability a key characteristic of any test that is to be
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used for scientific style comparisons and minimal potential bottlenecks
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elsewhere in the system to simplify comparisons across different test
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benches and prevent a situation where say you're trying to I don't know test
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the speed of your shiny new Lightning Fast SSD by copying data from a hard
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drive a much slower device in the first place which would make all ssds appear
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to perform identically to each other the same speed as a hard drive the problems
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with synthetic benchmarks are several though first up is that because they
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work to ignore system bottlenecks they often deliver results that don't reflect
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the end user's experience because just because one component is getting twice
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as fast doesn't mean that the rest of the system improved in any tangible way
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and second because benchmarks Run High specialized workloads they are
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notoriously misused by Hardware manufacturers who might manipulate their
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Hardware or drivers to perform better in Industry standard benchmarks even if
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this comes with no day-to-day benefit or even with reduced performance in real
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world tasks which leads us to the other main type of benchmarks realworld
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benchmarks simple versions of these like cinebench or The Benchmark drop down
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built into szip take a predetermined but
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otherwise totally real workload in these cases 3D rendering or file compression
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and decompression and have the computer process it as fast as possible then spit
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out a number to tell you how well it went while more complicated real world
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benchmarks often need to be custom developed by PC Hardware Publications
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like aanch with their storage Benchmark Suite that was created by recording the
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actions of a user performing everyday tasks on a computer than running that IO
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trace on every new drive that enters the lab but some benchmarks don't really
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fall cleanly into either of these two categories future marks PC Mark and 3D
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Mark series are great examples here they feature components that are purely
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synthetic like measurements of in-game physics performance on a CPU components
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that are real world based like webpage loading times and then they spit out a
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score that in theory quantifies the performance of the machine all right
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lonus then so which one should I believe
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synthetic or real world or like the hybrid model and the answer is kind of
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all three if a real world Benchmark is available for your exact given workload
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let's say 4K video editing then go with that first but if it's not available or
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you're planning for a future hypothetical workload a hybrid or
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synthetic Benchmark may be your only choice so just make sure that you
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educate yourself about what the numbers you're looking at mean before making a
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thanks for watching this episode as fast as possible guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it
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leave a comment letting me know if you have suggestions for future fastest possibles and as always if you aren't
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already don't forget to subscribe and share this video if you thought it was
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helpful in somewhere