BAPCo, Business Applications Performance Corporation, is a non-profit consortium (founded in 1991) with a charter to develop and distribute a set of objective performance benchmarks for personal computers based on popular software applications and operating systems.
As of 2024, BAPCo's current membership includes Acer, ARCIntuition, Compal, Dell, Dynabook, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Inventec, LC Future Center, Lenovo, Pegatron, Quanta Computer, Samsung, Western Digital and Wistron, among others. [1]
Benchmarks from BAPCo include:
BAPco has suffered criticism for bias in its benchmarking products. It was found in 2002 that Intel was the sole contributor to a series of CPU tests, tests which heavily favoured their own CPU's vs competitors, where the tests of the year before performed significantly better on non-Intel parts. [2] In 2011, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nividia left BAPCo with AMD claiming that the SYSmark benchmark was biased toward Intel. [3] Intel was investigated by the FTC, and eventually fined for this action, among other anti-competitive measures. [4]
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
Processor design is a subfield of computer science and computer engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware.
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue and ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking.
Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for comparing processors in the same family the IPS measurement can be problematic. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches and no cache contention, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values. Memory hierarchy also greatly affects processor performance, an issue barely considered in IPS calculations. Because of these problems, synthetic benchmarks such as Dhrystone are now generally used to estimate computer performance in commonly used applications, and raw IPS has fallen into disuse.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated speeds. Semiconductor devices operated at higher frequencies and voltages increase power consumption and heat. An overclocked device may be unreliable or fail completely if the additional heat load is not removed or power delivery components cannot meet increased power demands. Many device warranties state that overclocking or over-specification voids any warranty, but some manufacturers allow overclocking as long as it is done (relatively) safely.
In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components, and is used as an indicator of the processor's speed. It is measured in the SI unit of frequency hertz (Hz).
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed to accelerate computer graphics and image processing. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
The thermal design power (TDP), sometimes called thermal design point, is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipate under any workload.
In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density.
Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors. The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. Intel demonstrated an A1 stepping Sandy Bridge processor in 2009 during Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and released first products based on the architecture in January 2011 under the Core brand.
Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler and Intel C++ Compiler Classic are Intel’s C, C++, SYCL, and Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compilers for Intel processor-based systems, available for Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
Ryzen is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and marketed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units (CPUs) marketed for mainstream, enthusiast, server, and workstation segments and accelerated processing units (APUs) marketed for mainstream and entry-level segments and embedded systems applications.
Meltdown is one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities. Meltdown affects Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors. It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so.
Spectre is one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities, which involve microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks. These affect modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculation. On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack.
Zhaoxin is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company manufactures x86-compatible desktop and laptop CPUs. The term Zhàoxīn means million core. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.
Transient execution CPU vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in a computer system in which a speculative execution optimization implemented in a microprocessor is exploited to leak secret data to an unauthorized party. The archetype is Spectre, and transient execution attacks like Spectre belong to the cache-attack category, one of several categories of side-channel attacks. Since January 2018 many different cache-attack vulnerabilities have been identified.