The harmonic or geometric mean

For several decades, computer scientists have been arguing which mean is more appropriate for summarizing computer performance: the harmonic or the geometric. We show that many test cases used in the past to discredit one mean or the other are either artificial or incidental. Changing only one of the benchmarks may result in totally different conclusions.In addition, we conclude that for the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite, the choice of averaging has very little influence on the relative standing of different machines. Therefore, the decision to purchase one system rather then another should not be influenced by the type of averaging used.