Benchmark sparks
Benchmark sparks
“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure,” they used to say back in my engineering days. You can be scrupulously careful about quoting numbers accurately and still be blowing smoke at people if you are choosy about which numbers you choose to report. I've been thinking about this problem recently because it always comes to mind in the lead-up to a US election.
Dear Linux Pro Reader,
"Figures don't lie, but liars figure," they used to say back in my engineering days. You can be scrupulously careful about quoting numbers accurately and still be blowing smoke at people if you are choosy about which numbers you choose to report. I've been thinking about this problem recently because it always comes to mind in the lead-up to a US election. At this writing, two candidates are both claiming they are ahead in the race and quoting different polls and surveys. To each, the other's polls and surveys don't even exist – their world does not have room for information that conflicts with their story.
This same phenomenon was also in the High Tech news this month, when AMD posted a video on YouTube criticizing Intel's use of the SYSmark benchmarking tool for measuring PC performance. SYSmark shows the latest Intel processors outperforming AMD equivalents by a large margin. In the video, AMD spokesmen John Hampton and Tony Salinas argued that the alternative PCMark 8 benchmark shows a much more competitive race between the Intel and AMD chips, and they demonstrate some practical use cases that show the PCMark 8 is more accurate than anything Intel is using.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.