In the years between 1992 and 1997, a scalar performance table,
Zur Charakterisierung der Einprozessor-Rechenleistung
verschiedener Maschinen 
, was maintained.
Skeptics expressed doubts but the majority of experienced users
who ran scientific or engineering codes on cache-based systems widely confirmed
that table data. And, of course, the numbers belonging to the vector computers
are questionable at all, but, measured is measured, finally.
A remark. The quantifying software has been reactivated in 2007 to deliver the line for a system with an Intel P4 at 2.4 GHz with 512 KB L2 Cache and 400 MHz system bus, together with 1.5 GB PC100 CL2 ECC SDRAM on an ASUS P4B mainboard. That line has been added to the list in red. Even though the described system was not all the rage at this time, it represented the 2002 technology state, one sees where we were with the off-the-shelf components at the end of the last millennium.
One more remark. The mentioned Experiment , after some comments on the table
entries, was the beginning of an appropriate work later on that finished under the
headline Access Delays Related to the Main Memory Hierarchy
on SGI Origin2000 and can can be found
under Publications, for example.