Month: February 2023

Enlarge (credit: Primate Labs)

We review a lot of hardware at Ars, and part of that review process involves running benchmark apps. The exact apps we use may change over time and based on what we're trying to measure, but the purpose is the same: to compare the relative performance of two or more things and to make sure that products perform as well in real life as they do on paper.

One app that has been a consistent part of our test suite for over a decade is Geekbench, a CPU and GPU compute benchmark that is releasing its sixth major version today. Partly because it's small, free, and easy to run; partly because developer Primate Labs maintains a gigantic searchable database spanning millions of test runs across millions of devices; and partly because it will run on just about anything under the sun, Geekbench has become one of the Internet's most-used (and most-argued-about) benchmarking tools.

"I'm really glad that people seem to have latched onto it," Primate Labs founder and Geekbench creator John Poole told Ars of Geekbench's popularity. "I know Gordon Ung at PCWorld basically calls Geekbench the official benchmark of Twitter arguments, which is the fallout from that."

Enlarge / India's Small Satellite Launch Vehicle takes flight on Feb. 10 2023. (credit: ISRO)

Welcome to Edition 5.26 of the Rocket Report! This week, I would like to congratulate the Indian space agency ISRO on the successful second flight of the SSLV rocket, which adds a new micro-launch capability to the nation's growing fleet of rockets. This is a difficult business, and success should definitely be celebrated when it is finally attained.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

India's SSLV soars on second launch. The second test flight of India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle was successful last Friday, delivering Indian and US-owned payloads into orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission followed the first SSLV test flight in August, which failed during separation of the second stage about six minutes after liftoff, when vibrations threw off the vehicle’s inertial navigation system.