CompuServe Messages

Actually, The analogy is more like using spoonfuls (unknown measure of liquid quantity) per reconing (unknown measuring of distance) for car comparisons. Personally I would like the analogy of calorie counting that occurs on various products (2 calories per serving) where the serving size is undefined and totally unrelated to anything meaningful. People like to have raw numbers that they can just compare, but it doesn't make those numbers very meaningful. MIPS is one of the bext examples of such and many of the manufacturers of CPUs like to play those games. Have you ever noticed that the RS-6000 has a higher MIPS rating than the 3081? Personally, I think that the 3081 blows the RS-6000 out of the water as soon as you put 50 users on the box. The key here is all of the support that the processor brings with it. The closest thing to a universal test has been the SPEC benchmarks. A lot of effort has been put into making them large meaningful tests of typical application work. However, they do take a bit of resources to get running and certainly won't allow you to compare to a PC with 64K of ram (assuming that you can find one). The ONLY time that MIPS and MFLOPS are meaningful are for the SAME instruction set with the SAME hardware. Comparing a 8086 to a 80386 would give a good realtive comparison of improvement, but certainly doesn't tell you diddly squat compared to a 68K.