In most languages other than American English a billion is a million mllion. A thousand million is a milliard - even officially in UK English. These days, the American usage is becoming prevalent in the UK as well.
The idea behind kMIPS (and I agree it's an abortion) was to provide a scalable nmber that would get us away from the apparent precision of the five-digit numbers regularly thrown around when discussing, e.g., z9 performance. Back when we had 15 MIPS machines, we knew damn well that they actually ran at 13 MIPS on some workloads and 17 MIPS on others. No one (even deranged) would have referred to a 15.000 MIPS machine - but people are now routinely referring to 15,000 MIPS machines. And these days that precision is less justified and - in an era of ugrade on demand - less necessary. Hence the idea of 15 kMIPS instead of 15,000 MIPS. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
