[shard]

Have you ever thought about what the business model is for benchmark companies?

It probably won't come as a surprise to many of you, but there's a major conflict of interest when it comes to benchmark companies. They have "benchmark development programs" which companies pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to join, and in turn the member companies get early access to beta versions of the benchmarks, and get to propose optimizations to the benchmarks.

Now the benchmark companies insist that they make impartial decisions when it comes to what to include or improve in the benchmarks, but you have to wonder just how much influence these member companies have over the benchmark companies, especially when it comes to new features that are in one but not all devices, or features that are not often used by developers but have different performance on different devices, what the decision process is to include tests for those features.