Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!rutgers!husc6!endor!reiter
From: reiter@endor.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: MIPS and LIPS
Message-ID: <3587@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 87 16:10:35 GMT
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: reiter@harvard.UUCP (Ehud Reiter)
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab Harvard, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 21

I recently saw a videotape made by a VP at Apollo (I forget his name), who
talked not only about "MIPS" and "MFLOPS", but also about "LIPS".
According to a slide he put up, a "LIP" is a "Logical Inference Per
Second" and is measured by the "Gabriel Benchamrk".

Now, the only way I've previously heard "LIPS" used is as a measure of how
many unifications per second a PROLOG system can do.  The Gabriel benchmark
suite, of course, measures LISP performance.  Also, the Gabriel suite produces
around 20-30 numbers, and Gabriel (in his book) very explicitly states that
these numbers are not to be averaged or otherwise combined into one summary
statistic.

So, the Apollo VP (and he was a technical guy, not a marketing person)
used a very misleading PROLOG term to characterize an summary statistic of
LISP programs, and a summary statistic which was forbidden by the author of
the benchmark suite he claimed to use.

By comparison, the MIPS debate is a fountain of clarity ...

					Ehud Reiter
					reiter@harvard	(ARPA,BITNET,UUCP)
					reiter@harvard.harvard.EDU  (new ARPA)