Hierarchical INTegration, or HINT for short, is a computer benchmark that ranks a computer system as a whole (i.e. the entire computer instead of individual components). It measures the full range of performance, mostly based on the amount of work a computer can perform over time. A system with a very fast processor would likely be rated poorly if the buses were very poor compared to those of another system that had both an average processor and average buses. For example, in the past, Macintosh computers with relatively slow processor speeds (800 MHz) used to perform better than x86 based systems with processors running at nearly 2 GHz.
HINT is widely known for being almost immune to artificial optimization. HINT can be used by many computers ranging from a calculator to a supercomputer. It was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
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