Old engineers remember the Digital Equipment Corporations' VAX 11/780 computer. The Vax 11/780 was the "benchmark" unit of computing (1 MIP) in the engineering world of the 1980's. Competitors had to compare their performance to the VAX 11/780. It was the machine Unix grew up on.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX-11

I think the iPhone 4s  became the first "benchmark" of pocket computers  (i.e. smartphones). It hit the "sweet spot" of cost/performance running a general purpose dual core iOS 5.0 (shared with iPods) with a MAC look and feel and properly virtualized i/o.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4S