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From: jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: MIPSes.
Message-ID: <8710040336.AA08521@mitre-bedford.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 3-Oct-87 23:36:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: mitre-be.8710040336.AA08521
Posted: Sat Oct  3 23:36:16 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Oct-87 07:47:14 EDT
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Aha!  I *KNEW* somebody would do it.  Dave Haynie writes:

>>MIPS -> Million Instructions Per Second.  Sounds clear, right?  Think again.
>>  ...and you've got yourself a sustained 1 MIP machine..

A 1 MIP machine?  A machine that does one Million Instructions Per?
Per what?  Does it just stop after a million instructions, roll over and
beg for warranty service?

The "S" in MIPS stands for "Second", not a plural!  It's a 1 MIPS machine,
not a 1 MIP machine if you mean 1 Million Instructions Per Second!

A linguist would say Mr. Haynie had produced what is called a "back formation"
in instinctively using "MIP" as the singular of the obviously plural "MIPS".
Sorry to pick on you, Dave, but yours was the first note I could pick on,
because the previous ones seemed (to my amazement) to avoid this very common
error.

-John Sangster / jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa

P.S. In my next nitpick, I will comment on the phenomenon of "Is Doubling"
that I am hearing more and more these days, as in "The thing is, is that..."