Computer Benchmarks (Score 1)

I'm a configurable computing researcher so I'm a fan of the FPGA and what is has to offer to the computational world. This announcement, however, is a typical demonstration of how to abuse computer benchmarking. Their claim of being the world's fastest computing architecture is based on comparing their 12.8 TFlop number to IBM's 1.2 TFlop number. But, they're just numbers. To understand what they mean, you have to look at the units. The same way that you can't say that 12 inches is a lot longer than 1 yard, you can't really say that executing 12.8x10^9 4-bit add operations is more than IBM's 1.2x10^9. For one thing the press release doesn't even say what the unit on IBM's number is. At the minimum it's probably a 32-bit integer add and it's probably an IEEE floating point operation. Comparing a 4-bit add to IEEE 32-bit floating point add is like comparing an inch to a yard.