A software benchmark originally written in ALGOL by Harold Curnow and named after the town of where it was developed. Whetstone was first widely released in November 1972, and is considered to be one of the first benchmarks for performance. Whetstone measures performance using floating point instructions and gives results in “KWIPS,” or thousands of Whetstone Instructions Per Second.

Benchmark, Software terms

  • How to measure a computer’s performance.
  • How to find hardware and other computer specifications.