> My only point was that MIPS as a general measurement is useful, but its not a
> perfect way to compare floating point power.

Dhrystone (DMIPS) is a pure integer benchmark. It doesn't measure floating point performance at all. Floating point performance can be measured for instance by Whetstone (MWIPS), LINPACK (MFLOPS) or LAPACK. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhrystone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whetstone_(benchmark)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK

> how willing pointing point operations compare between
> the 5500 and the Titan?

That remains to be seen. All processors from Applied Micro which have an FPU (i.e. some of the PPC440 core based ones and all of the PPC464FP core based ones) deliver 2.0 MFLOPS per MHz in both single and double precision. I've yet to find numeric floating point performance figures for the e5500. All I know is that compared to the e500mc the e5500 has twice the single precision performance per clock and up to quadruple the double precision performance per clock. But I don't have any real numbers for the e500mc either.

Edit:

Freescale's e500mc presentation notes that e500mc has "same floating point unit as e300", but which is half clocked in relation to the core clock and thus half performant. So I'd conclude that compared to the e300 the e5500 has the same single precision performance per clock and up to twice the double precision performance per clock. Now we only need the floating point performance figures for the e300 to get the whole picture ;-)

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2010/8/17 3:35 ]