benchmarkingnoun

benchmark | American Dictionary

benchmark
noun[ C ]
us/ˈbentʃˌmɑrk/
a standard for measuring or judging other things of the same type:
Her performances set a new benchmark for classical pianists.

benchmark | Business English

benchmark
noun[ C ]
uk /ˈbenʃmɑːk/us
a level of quality that can be used as a standard against which to compare other things:
Apple's iconic iPhone became the benchmark in the market.
The new report provides a benchmark for food companies around the world.
The catalog industry can discover new opportunities by comparing its own business trends to industry benchmarks.
They set the benchmark for ethical beauty packaging.
The company sets the benchmark against which other businesses make health care decisions.
FINANCE
a share price, interest rate, etc. that other share prices, interest rates, etc. can be compared against:
the benchmark for sthThis year the benchmark for iron ore is $60 a tonne.
The Merval stock index, the benchmark measure of Argentina's stock market, rose 8.2% yesterday.
The benchmark price of oil dropped from $59 to $53 per barrel.
IT
a computer program that measures the quality and speed of computer software or hardware (= equipment or electronic parts):
benchmark program/software/testThe benchmark tests show that the new machines are only slightly faster.
benchmark
verb
uk /ˈbenʃmɑːk/us
[ T ]
to measure the quality of something by comparing it with something else of an accepted standard:
Being able to benchmark performance is very important for new companies.
The European Parliament has launched a programme to benchmark employment laws across the EU.
[ I or T ]
to use something as a standard in order to improve your own work, products, or processes:
benchmark (sb/sth) against sthThe company continues to benchmark against the competition.
The results allow the company to benchmark itself against other organizations and identify areas for improvement.
[ T ] IT
to test the quality and speed of computer software or hardware(= equipment or electronic parts):
Benchmark the speed of your computer.

Examples of benchmark

benchmark
Using these benchmarks, we measured the impact of different heuristics used in the select action function.
To measure the parameters describing the states reached by the compressed material and thus to provide benchmarks for simulation codes, different optical diagnostics were employed.
To provide two important benchmarks, for each window we estimate two linear models.
The first example concerns a recent controversy surrounding the use of national literacy benchmarks for primary school lear ners.
Many things were important as benchmarks of how this progress could be measured - education, increasing professionalisation, artistic production - but the underlying criterion was material.
To answer this question, we construct several real benchmarks - real in that they produce useful results.
We use the benchmarker of each adt to time each implementation and its variants over a sample of 100 benchmarks.
I shall mention only the more important of these benchmarks.
Section 7 discusses the applicability of our results through simple examples of programs and reports the results obtained by applying our method to various benchmarks.
The gen gc systems have a higher memory usage than the inc gc systems for most benchmarks.
Between the non-incremental systems, the stack-splitting system performs better in most of the benchmarks than the scheduling on top-most choice-point system.
As we will demonstrate in our experiments, this is not really an issue with the benchmarks in the literature.
In all benchmarks the improved trailing scheme is faster than the classic scheme.
The results for the smaller benchmarks are confirmed by the larger comp program.
The deterministic nature of both hanoi and qsort benchmarks, allows the analysis to infer that all unifications should be replaced by a non-trailing alternative.
See all examples of benchmark
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.