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)