Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: New SparcStation
Message-ID: <3045@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 17 Dec 90 18:16:22 GMT
References: <184127@<1990Dec13> <3300233@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 26

In article <3300233@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:

| Seriously, who cares about this extra .5 mips?  Why not 29 mips?  Why
| not 28 mips?  BUT NOOOOOOO 28.5 mips.  Be precise.  After all a "MIPS"
| is such a precise quantity anyway.

  You're right! I don't care about the extra .5 MIP.

  It doesn't offend me at all...

  Although I don't have the material at hand, I thought the figure was
28.5 SPECmarks. Now while I'm not offended by the idea of meaningless
MIPS meaningless SPECmarks... well I don't much care about that either.

  What's the big deal? Data should be reported to some approximation of
the reproducibility of their measurement. Can SPECmarks be measured
closer than one part in 28? If so why not report the value measured?

  Maybe you can get some rightious indignation in the benchmarks group,
but I doubt that either. I would consider publishing the extra digit of
reported results about as important as the colors used for the yearly
report to stockholders.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.