The VAX Unit of Performance, or VUP for short, is an obsolete measurement of computer performance used by
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...
(DEC). 1 VUP was equivalent to the performance of a
VAX 11/780 completing a given task.
Other
VAX
VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...
machines and later
workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...
designs were compared in performance terms by defining system speed in VUPs, for instance, the
VAXft Model 310 ran at 3.8 VUPs, meaning it ran roughly 3.8 times as fast as the 11/780.
The term was used largely within the DEC and its community, and fell from use as more standard ratings like
SPEC Spec may refer to:
*Specification (technical standard), an explicit set of requirements to be satisfied by a material, product, or service
**datasheet, or "spec sheet"
People
* Spec Harkness (1887-1952), American professional baseball pitcher
...
became more widely used. This was especially true with the introduction of DEC workstations running
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
, in which case the VUP was of little use comparing the platforms to competition systems.
Benchmarks (computing)
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