Wow! Thank you, Ted, for the token of recognition! As I see, P.Emma [1] has expressed similar sentiment (to which I arrived independently and two years later :-( ): "First, the most popular performance metric, IPC (instructions per cycle), is the reciprocal of the metric that should be used, CPI (cycles per instruction). This is primarily because CPI is a simple dot product of a few numbers that any experienced designer should have at his fingertips. It is intuitive, and it makes for remarkably quick and remarkably accurate estimates.", http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/413/emma.pdf (it's easier to read). For those who might be interested, the original Powerpoint of the 1999 SPEC Workshop presentation can found here: http://home.austin.rr.com/bah/SPECworkshop/frame.htm There is a populistic paper on the subject on my website http://home.austin.rr.com/bah/index.htm and also several examples which were intended to illustrate usefulness of the scaling approach in "time-domain" coordinates. Thanks again for the nice article. »