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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (169769)	8/22/2002 12:48:29 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 186894

Tenchusatsu, Re: "This probably sounded like a long-winded defense of MHz as a (if not THE) metric of performance, and that wasn't my intention. My point is that any high-profile metric of performance will be subject to distortion and politics, no matter how objective you make it or how trustworthy the players are. And we'll only be trading one debate for another." I agree with you. Maintaining the integrity of a benchmark gets harder as it becomes higher profile, especially when succeeding in this business depends on how much performance you can squeeze out of your products. SPEC was designed with all these things in mind, yet now it's going out of style. The same can be said for many different benchmarks, I think. The idea of creating the "perfect benchmark system" isn't novel to the 21st century. wbmw

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (169769)	8/22/2002 1:07:15 PM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 186894

T., Remember that any system-based performance metric will be open to rampant cheating, or the accusations of such. I remember those days. What was it, Winmark, or winstones? The graphics card companies were the worst offenders. One thing I like about MHz is the fact that you cannot easily fake it. Even a processor designed with high clock speed in mind (like the Pentium 4) has many challenges to meet, including process limitations and power dissipation. But when you buy a processor that runs at a given clock speed, you KNOW how fast that processor is running. Whether that actually translates to real performance is another question. But at least MHz is not as easily fudged as, say, QuantiSpeed (whose scale is only determined by the whims of marketeers). In hard drives, you get their RPM, but that tells you about as much about the performance of the hard drive as MHz, and could theoretically be measured, and free from cheating. 1 GHz Itanium will beat the pants off 3 GHz P4 in SpecFp, but will lose at SpecInt by wide margin, and countless other examples could be found. MHz means something only to a person that is familiar with computer architecture, which is about 1% of the population (= geeks). It does not help 99% of the populations, unless they are comparing Brand A CPU, stepping X, at clock speed of Y MHz, vs. the very same brand, model number stepping of another CPU running at Y + 100 MHz. Joe