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.
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