INTRODUCTION

In our modern world, computers are used so prevalently that evaluation of the performance of a
computer system or more specifically, the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is incredibly
important in a variety of decisions.

One of the ways that CPU performance is evaluated is by a dimensionless, manufacturer provided metric
called published relative performance (PRP). However, there are three problems with relying on
published relative performance to evaluate CPU performance. First, not all manufacturers provide the
metric, so we do not have the published relative performance for all brands and models on the market.
Second, manufacturers are not transparent about their methods to come up with this metric.Thus, we
must find a way to estimate PRP based on the data we currently have

The Dataset
Phillip Ein-dor and Jacob Feldmesser collected data for 209 computers that were on the market in 1981-
1984 for various manufacturers and performance capabilities. Seven attributes were collected for each
computer:

published relative performance

cache memory
minimum I/O channels
maximum I/O channels
machine cycle time
minimum main memory
and maximum main memory

Number of Instances: 209

Number of Attributes: 10 (6 predictive attributes, 2 non-predictive, 1 goal field, and the linear regression's
guess)

Missing Attribute Values: None