[_notreallyme_]

I don't get how expressing these numbers in time unit is useful ?

I've been a developer for embedded systems in the telecom industry for nearly two decades now, and I had never met anyone using something else than "cycles" or "symbols" until today... Except obviously for the mean RTT US<->EU.

[mlyle]

> I've been a developer for embedded systems in the telecom industry for nearly two decades now

On big computers, cycles are squishy (HT, multicore, variable clock frequency, so many clock domains) and not what we're dealing with.

If we're making an architectural choice between local storage and the network, we need to be able to make an apples to apples comparison.

I think it's great this resource is out there, because the tradeoffs have changed. "RAM is the new disk", etc.

[_notreallyme_]

then, why not just using qualifiers ? from slowest to fastest. You might not know that, but you can develop bare metals solution for HPC that are used in several industries like telecommunication. Calculation based on cycles are totally accurate whether the number of cores...

[Izkata]

Because it's something very different. I was expecting standalone numbers that would hint to the user something is wonky if they showed up in unexpected places - numbers like 255 or 2147483647.

[saagarjha]

It gives you a rough understanding of how many you can do in a second.