> ... as most developers will have access to one or a windows machine of similar stats.
That's a bold assumption. Looking around my office in India here, I find not a single Macbook, a Windows machine, or any machine from '11. It would also be trouble to get my hands on a Macbook Air '11, if I had to do it for the purposes of reproducing a benchmark. I certainly couldn't buy one today, and even if I were to buy a currently-in-stores Macbook it'd be awfully expensive.
A much better proposition would be something far more ubiquitous and accessible, something that can be borrowed trivially or bought easily by the vast majority of people, something that stays stable and available for a number of years. An AWS instance or a Raspberry Pi (1/2/3), for instance.
Thank you for calling this out. It was the spirit of what I was trying to go for, because the website use "60GB of RAM (EC2 c3.8xlarge)" which I wouldn't even pay for.
I totally agree with the RasPi suggestion. Though note, the RasPi 3 B+ is actually about as powerful as my 5 year old air, 1.4GHz quadcore vs 1.6GHz quadcore.
> 60GB of RAM (EC2 c3.8xlarge)" which I wouldn't even pay for.
The point isn't to restrict benchmarks to only high-end machines. The point is to use a stable standard that people wouldn't have trouble running for a few hours. I can rent a machine of that identical type for 20 hours, or buy an RPi, for the low price of $35.
> about as powerful as my 5 year old air, 1.4GHz quadcore vs 1.6GHz quadcore
Core counts and clock speeds do not translate to comparable computing power across processor families and instruction sets. E.g., the RPi 4 (1.5GHz, quadcore) is announced to deliver 3x the performance of an RPi 3B+ (1.4GHz, quadcore), and that's on the same instruction set.
> Though note, the RasPi 3 B+ is actually about as powerful as my 5 year old air, 1.4GHz quadcore vs 1.6GHz quadcore.
I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison. The Pi 3 doesn't have an out-of-order CPU so can't do instruction level parallelism. The new Pi 4 is better in this regard, but both are handily beaten by Intel CPU's from the last 10 years.
That's a bold assumption. Looking around my office in India here, I find not a single Macbook, a Windows machine, or any machine from '11. It would also be trouble to get my hands on a Macbook Air '11, if I had to do it for the purposes of reproducing a benchmark. I certainly couldn't buy one today, and even if I were to buy a currently-in-stores Macbook it'd be awfully expensive.
A much better proposition would be something far more ubiquitous and accessible, something that can be borrowed trivially or bought easily by the vast majority of people, something that stays stable and available for a number of years. An AWS instance or a Raspberry Pi (1/2/3), for instance.