In
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
on 10/10/2006
at 05:20 PM, "Ward, Mike S" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>The thing that gets me is the MIPS. You can go from a machine that
>has a single processor at 100 mips. To a processor that has 4 cpus
>at 100 mips each and they call it 400 mips. Depending on you
>workload type that may not buy you anything and you are still
>chugging along with just more mips. What I would rather see is the
>actual cycle rate of the processor go up. Give me the mips 400 but
>with two processors at 200 mips each, or even 1 400 mip processor.
That might be nice for some workloads, although it would be very bad
for others. Either way, would you buy the 1 CPU 400 MIPS box if it
cost 3 times as much as the 4 CPU 400 MIPS box? IBM has to balance the
cost of making the processor faster against the cost of adding more
processors.
>This mips rate is underrated unless you know the true meaning
>of mips.
The true meaning of MIPS is that there is no true meaning of MIPS. It
stands for millions of instructions per second, and you get
drastically different numbers depending on what instruction mix you
use. Worse, when you compare two different processor designs[1] you
can't even say which is faster, never mind how much faster.
[1] Say 3158 against 4341.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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