What? I have never seen that as a problem, and I've probably consumed thousands of benchmarking articles over the years. Benchmarks either use the (in my pov stupid) "X percentage units faster" or x faster/slower method. The latter is obvious, the former is not.
As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
> What? I have never seen that as a problem, and I've probably consumed thousands of benchmarking articles over the years.
Possibly you gloss over the words as you're used to them, but don't stop to think what each paper really means? I didn't either until one day I stopped and did.
I wrote a blog post about this, but unfortunately never got around to posting it because I think it came across as rather pedantic. I surveyed the language used to express speedup in systems papers using benchmarking in top conferences and produced this table:
Each row is a different way to talk about the same thing, then the English way to say it, then each column is what this looks like for a different example value, then the actual mathematical expression.
Just to emphasise this - each column is the same empirical result, and then each row in the column is a different way to express that same result, that I've seen in a paper.
> The latter is obvious, the former is not.
I'm afraid it isn't as obvious to everyone, and other people may think it's obviously something different to you. You'll notice that some English phrases can be interpreted in multiple reasonable ways. Is running in half the time '1 times faster' or '2 times faster'? You'll see both in the wild.
> As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Is '2 times as fast' the same as '2 times faster'? Some papers think so, others not.
Have you read the root comment of this thread... that's an example of real-world confusion right there! Just with markup not speedup. It's the same maths and the same confusion.