Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review

SunSpider and BrowserMark

Next up, we have some numbers from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
JavsScript Performance Testing

This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.

All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Internet Explorer, with default browser settings, on Windows 8.1.

 

The Surface Pro 3 put up the best SunSpider score we've seen to date, besting the Lenovo Ultrabook, Dell convertible, and the rest of the tablets.

Browsermark 2.0
Browser-Based Performance

 

The Surface Pro 3 also put up the best BrowserMark score we've seen yet, outpacing every other platform we tested by a decent margin.
 


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