Path: utzoo!attcan!ncrcan!ziebmef!stephen
From: stephen@ziebmef.mef.org (Stephen M. Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Norton Si
Summary: what it measures
Message-ID: <1989Aug25.162653.25755@ziebmef.mef.org>
Date: 25 Aug 89 20:26:52 GMT
References: <478@v7fs1.UUCP> <224@orchid.warwick.ac.uk>
Reply-To: stephen@ziebmef.mef.org (Stephen M. Dunn)
Organization: Ziebmef Public Access Unix, Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 35

In article <224@orchid.warwick.ac.uk> asrap@warwick.ac.uk (Sean Legassick) writes:
$Norton SI is supposed to give you the peformance of your machine
$relative to a plain vanilla IBM PC - don't see many of them now! -
$as a figure, i.e. if SI returns a value of 2.0, then your machine
$should be twice as fast as an IBM PC.

$It does this by running benchmarks, comparing the time taken to peform
$certain mundane activities with the time it takes a PC. In this age
$of VGA displays and frequent hard-disk accesses, however, this
$figure bears little relation to actual real-time usage, and so is
$of little use.

   As far as the display goes, fine, but the more recent SI versions _do_
test your hard disk.  They come up with three numbers:

1.  Raw processing power relative to the XT
2.  Some measure of hard disk speed relative to the XT's 10 Mb drive (I think)
3.  Some sort of combination of the two

   Of course, there have been many complaints about the fact that Norton's
SI seems skewed in favour of 286s (and higher) due to a (perhaps) inappropriate
choice of benchmarking algorithm.  I don't know if any adjustments have been
made or not.

   And, of course, any benchmark will only be an approximation based on what
the author thinks a typical user's usage patterns will be.  If I use my
hard drive more than you do on an identical machine, we'll get different
performance levels even though SI won't find any difference because it uses
some assumed weighting in computing the overall performance score.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
! Stephen M. Dunn              stephen@ziebmef.UUCP ! DISCLAIMER:  Who'd ever !
!---------------------------------------------------! claim such dumb ideas?  !
! I have become comfortably numb ...                ! I sure as heck wouldn't !