The System Benchmark

How does a business rate a computer system? With the modern world of total user customization of hardware, and an unparalleled amount of software that is available for just about any usage or purpose, how is it possible to compare a system to another system that has totally different parts, unknown software, and a different purpose? I saw this article and it caught my eye:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2684640/beyond-flops-the-co-evolving-world-of-computer-benchmarking.html

This article gave a couple of different companies that can be used to interdependently verify and benchmark a system whether that system is in an office, bank, or a data center. Each different company could test your system with a common tool called a suite of tests (since one test alone could not measure every aspect of a system) and then the suite would generate a report that "rated" your system in efficiency and power as well as other important numbers.

Toward the end of the article I noticed that it shifted from the examination of the process and the companies that preform the tests, but instead into what the future can bring when a business wants to look at a benchmark. The article hinted that the standard measure of a system (the FLOP) was actually not a good way to measure anything since most of the time it is not intense calculations the computer system is doing. This could mean that sometime in the near or distant future consumers and businesses alike could see a shift towards the measurement of different variables such as power consumption or elapsed time in a much more efficient and effective system.