idontlikeapple

Performance can be defined as how the hardware can be used by the software in some kind of optimal way. A simple example is can the software be multi-thread to take the advantage of the multi-core of the CPU?

Software can be defined as the target application i.e. IE7 or Windows or Linux.

Hardware capability can be considered - number of multiple core, the chipset of the core, the threading capability etc.

In general, there is a lot of benchmarking in there to compare different software and hardware features.