Yeah 'auto' really messed ET up. The consequences the design would have on ET was not on the committees mind. I guess there was no one there in the committee who was that deep into high performance computing of this kind.

> computation boils down to the same flops either way?

same number of operations, yes possibly, but that carries almost no weight at all. Write a straight 3 nested for loop for a matrix multiply and then right another one with some thoughts on cache re-use. The latter will beat the former by an order of magnitude if not two. The situation is a bit better now thanks to 'smart enough compilers'.