Adecvax.204 net.works utzoo!decvax!minow Wed Apr 14 18:56:28 1982 Re: another view of mips One problem with published benchmarks, such as Wheatstone's, is that less than honorable vendors might try to tune their compiler/operating system to the benchmark. There are reports of such things happening for Fortran compilers and the Wheatstone benchmark, by the way. When Dec first announced Fortran-IV-PLUS and the 11/70 at Hannover (1974 or 1975), someone went around to all the vendors with a Fortran benchmark. The 11/70 ran it in zero time. Turned out to be a loop like: X = 0 DO 10 I=1, 100 DO 10 J=1, 100 10 X = X + 1 Fortran-IV-PLUS did the entire computation at compile-time, generating I = 101 J = 101 X = 10000 exit The person running the benchmark accepted it as valid. Moral: benchmarks -- especially computational ones -- are generally unrepresentative of situations where the customer asks "How many users can I put on my ..." (correction: "where the customer really wants to know...") Martin Minow decvax!minow ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.