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From: philm@astroatc.UUCP (Phil Mason)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Mips / MHz
Message-ID: <384@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 18:22:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: astroatc.384
Posted: Mon May 12 18:22:44 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 14-May-86 19:33:08 EDT
References: <1363@unc.unc.UUCP> <467@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: philm@astroatc.UUCP (Phil Mason)
Distribution: net
Organization: Astronautics ATC, Madison, WI
Lines: 41

It seems to me that this whole situation about the measurement of relative
computing power is directly analogous to the situation when the early
physicists and engineers first attempted to formalize the concept of POWER.

One basic unit of mechanical power is that of Horsepower.  A horsepower is the 
amount of power necessary to raise 33,000 pounds by one foot in one minute.

Obviously, someone tried to rank every other powerful machine against a horse.
Other units of power were theoretically derived from fundamental units.

I think we should look towards this example in order to get a bearing on the
kind of measurement we all need in the enviroment of computer benchmarking.

Power is defined to be the time rate at which work is done.  That leaves us
in a little bit of a quandry.  What is a unit of work for computer systems?
It must be related to how the CPU affects the information it processes.
I can think of two methods with which one may approach this :

(1) Use machine independent standard tasks to grade performance between
    different computers - The Benchmark Approach
                   
      -- or --

(2) Define a fundamental unit of information processing work 
    - The Theoretical Approach 

I am sure that some form of theoretical approach would bear fruit given
enough fruit.  My initial guess is that it would have some relation to
Turing machine theory as well as algorithm and information theory works
that already exist.

Comments?

-- 
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Kirk  : Bones ?               Phil Mason, Astronautics Technical Center
Bones : He's dead Jim.        {Your Favorite System}!uwvax!astroatc!philm

My opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.
(I would like to think that my employer believes in them too.)  :-)
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