Performance Testing of Computer Systems

📄 Project Abstract

When purchasing a new computer system the purchaser will look for a system that gives them the highest performance for the budget that they have. When judging the performance that a system offers them it is common to assume that the specifications of the hardware given by the manufacturers will give all the information needed. This is however can be misleading as manufacturers will quote performance in such a way that shows their product to be the best, for example a manufacturer may claim that their processor clocks at 1GHz, thus a potential customer may choose that one over one that ran at say 900MHz. The problem with this is that the 900MHz processor may be capable of executing more instructions per cycle than that of the 1GHz machine and therefore offer higher performance as it does more work per clock cycle even though it cycles at a slower rate. In this way there are a lot of ambiguities in evaluating a computer systems performance. The aim of this project is to thoroughly evalua...