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"Or, as I like to say, 14.4Mhz."

Sorry, I don't like that at all.




Inclined to agree. Title made me think it was a retro-computing analysis of running dBASE II on an IBM PC/AT or some such.


I would agree. While 14.4 million writes per second is impressive, it definitely doesn't fit the definition of the Hz unit (cycles per second).


"Hertz" just means "per second". It can be anything per second, there are no units in the numerator. It just a measure of frequency, anything per second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz

If anything you are counting is happening 14.4 million times a second, then that thing is happening at 14 megahertz. It's just a unit. If there are 14.4 million writes per second, then the writes are occuring at 14.4 mega hertz. That's just the definition of hertz.

Haha, Google agrees, check it out: https://www.google.com/?q=4+per+second#q=4+per+second


"Hertz" just means "cycles per second".

The reference is to frequency, not average or typical rate; there's a difference between a tone and pink noise.


And in their test, they made writes at that frequency, right?

It is, however, commonly used for average frequency rates too, not just measurements of constant frequency. "Frequency" the word means how frequent something happens, right?

I don't know what the 'something' to measure frequency of in pink noise would be, but if there is something to count over time, you can measure it's frequency.

"Frequency is the number of occurences of a repeating event per unit time" says wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency

However, it is true that "In some fields, especially where frequency-domain analysis is used, the concept of frequency is applied only to sinusoidal phenomena, since in linear systems more complex periodic and nonperiodic phonomena are most easily analyzed in terms of sums of sinusoids of different frequencies." In some fields.

I have no idea why we're arguing about this except that we like arguing on the internet though.


I have no idea why we're arguing about this except that we like arguing on the internet though.

This.


Right, because a database write is not generally a periodic event. The unit they want is the becquerel - 14.4MBq might even sound more impressive because not so many people are familiar with that unit!


I agree that Hz seems to imply a periodic event.

But I disagree that the Bq is appropriate for this example; the becquerel quantifies radioactivity:

> The becquerel (symbol Bq) (pronounced: 'be-kə-rel) is the SI derived unit of radioactivity. One Bq is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel)


It can be a bandwidth. Setting up the application and/or bogons as a carrier of some scheme or other is up to the writer. Echo cancellation fun, cross-modulation, gain masking; hey, do it in A/B testing.


I am still trying to push, pull or twist my concept of an ultralow-power mcu that runs 14.4MHz (or at nearly 14mA drain, 32MHz) in order to have it not only perform its optimal max of 1 I/O per cycle but do a simultaneous random read and write. Values are 1kb and keys 16 bytes, though... (As opposed to using the 1000 Amazon vCPUs each ~1.0 Xeon core with 4 hyperthreads (see http://www.pythian.com/blog/virtual-cpus-with-amazon-web-ser... )) That would be a pretty fat memory model (or HMC controller) for a micro...




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