How to expose a processor score to indicate the processor's power?

[hmin]

This is an issue proposed by Wayne Carr:

If there was some way to separate it and have an extension to it for the parts that aren’t going to be in a web browser. What would be interesting is in addition to number of cores, maybe some rough performance number. I don’t know if it would be reasonable, but maybe sunspider score – not the particular score, but maybe in categories to reduce the fingerprinting a bit. Like maybe 1 – 8 where 1 is a fast pc and 8 is a slow phone. Just a thought. It would be useful to have some similar rough score for the gpu so you know if you should try using webgl or not for something complex.

[hmin]

[hmin] For the processor score, I think we can use the processor frequency as the performance score indicator, just a thought. Anyway, we need to figure out how it would be used by web app, and any other information of processor that is useful to a web app.

[wayne] frequency is a little tricky because it could be lower frequency but a more powerful processor that gets more done. But, you’re right it would need a good example use case. And the more complex this gets the harder to get approved. For gpu’s there’s the problem that you find out webgl is present but you can only do 2 fps, not 30. But, maybe that’s for the performance wg to figure out how to fix, not dev caps.