PC Design, Use, and Purchase Relations

For 25 years, industry standard benchmarks have proliferated, attempting to approximate user activities. This has helped drive the success of PCs to commodity levels by characterizing apps for designers and offering performance information for users. However, the many new configurations of each PC release cycle often leave users unsure about how to choose one. This paper takes a different approach, with tools based on new metrics to analyze real usage by millions of people. Our goal is to develop a methodology for deeper understanding of usage that can help designers satisfy users. These metrics demonstrate that usages are uniformly different between high- and low-end CPU-based systems, regardless of why a user bought a given system. We outline how this data can be used to partition markets and make more effective hardware (hw) and software (sw) design decisions tailoring systems for prospective markets.