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From: dce@sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Not All MIPS are Created Equally
Keywords: MIPS
Message-ID: <1989Oct21.212059.7757@sony.com>
Date: 21 Oct 89 21:20:59 GMT
References: <1989Oct20.190436.22949@sj.ate.slb.com> <1989Oct21.051814.13919@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Reply-To: dce@icky.Sony.COM (David Elliott)
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp.
Lines: 33

In article <1989Oct21.051814.13919@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> rcfische@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Raymond C. Fischer) writes:
>In article <1989Oct20.190436.22949@sj.ate.slb.com> enk@slcs.slb.com (Edan Kabatchnik) writes:
>>     Could someone shed some light on this for me?

>where it is meaningful.  The first is when your comparing two computers
>that use the same instruction set (as in two different models of VAXes)
>or when you're approximating to a standard instruction set (as in 4 VAX MIPS).
>You may notice that MIPS is often used when talking about RISC processors.
>Guess which kind this usage of MIPS is?

Unfair.

Different companies use different standards.  MIPS (the company) has
always tried to be quite fair, saying that a machine is 4 MIPS if it
can run a large set of benchmarks 4 times as fast as a given
configuration of a Vax 11/780.

Other companies have, for various reasons, chosen to compare with
different architectures, or use the "Millions of Instructions Per
Second" numbers.  For a while, there was talk of changing over to
using VUP (Vax Unit of Processing) as a standard, but companies
with inflated numbers didn't seem to join in very fast.

This doesn't help the customer any, which is why SPEC was formed.
SPEC is an organization started by a number of RISC vendors who
wanted to come up with a standard set of benchmarks and comparison
methodologies.  Assuming that SPEC works as advertized, you will be
able to obtain a report stating how various aspects of a machine
compare.

-- 
David Elliott
dce@sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce