
230 CHAPTER 4 Workload-Driven Evaluation
Processing Rate
A metric that is often quoted to characterize the performance of machines is the
number of computer operations that they execute per unit time (as opposed to oper-
ations that have meaning at the application level, such as transactions or chemical
bonds).
Classic examples are MFLOPS (millions of floating-point operations per
second) for floating-point-intensive programs and MIPS (millions of instructions
per second) for general programs. Much has been written about why these are not
good general metrics for performance even though they are popular in the market-
ing literature of vendors ...