Shaping the Landscape of Industry Standard Benchmarks: Contributions of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC)

Abstract

Established in 1988, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has had a significant impact on the computing industry’s use of industry-standard benchmarks. These benchmarks are widely adapted by systems and software vendors to illustrate performance competitiveness for their existing products, and to improve and monitor the performance of their products under development. Many buyers use TPC benchmark results as points of comparison when purchasing new computing systems and evaluating new technologies.

In this paper, the authors look at the contributions of the Transaction Processing Performance Council in shaping the landscape of industry standard benchmarks – from defining the fundamentals like performance, price for performance, and energy efficiency, to creating standards for independently auditing and reporting various aspects of the systems under test.