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They use TPS as a unit because that's how large banks and other transaction oriented entities do their provisioning and capacity planning. That's their 'unit', not CPU cycles.

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But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?

There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp.

And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC (https://www.spec.org/) says something, but not all.

I've looked at the tpc.org maybe 13 years ago. It never made sense to me to use it as a measurement unit back then and it still don't make sense to me now. :)

Because they are not arguing with scientists but with "decision makers". So bullshit is more important than proven facts... Tanksfully, banks are moving slowly out of mainframes. You'll never find a new business going on a mainframe. Mainframes users are captive, not free.

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