Hardware Difficulty Index

Scoring methodology

Arc's illustrative index compares a selected set of 40 machines across the 12 dimensions shown above. The starting 1–10 ratings are editorial judgements, not measured engineering effort or independently validated benchmarks. The linked Wikipedia pages provide background on each machine; they do not substantiate the ratings.

Within each dimension, rank = number of lower ratings + (number of equal ratings − 1) / 2. Ties share the average rank. Scale that rank to 1–10 using 1 + 9 × (rank − lowest rank) / (highest rank − lowest rank), then round to one decimal. Overall is the equal-weight average of those 12 rounded scores, rescaled across the same 40 machines to 1–10 and rounded to one decimal.

For example, illustrative ratings [2, 5, 5, 9] have ranks [0, 1.5, 1.5, 3] and scaled scores [1, 5.5, 5.5, 10]. Category filters only change the displayed rows; scores always use the full set. A 10 means the highest relative score in this sample, not ten times the effort of a 1. Adding machines or changing ratings can change the scores. No cost, build-time or safety comparison is established.