Asking about convergence speed in terms of "steps" or anything that isn't FLOPS or wall clock training speed is sometimes academically interesting but encourage

Asking about convergence speed in terms of "steps" or anything that isn't FLOPS or wall clock training speed is sometimes academically interesting but encourages "hiding the ball" so to speak. You can in general hide quantity in the number of steps by increasing the complexity of each step (for the trivial case, imagine one step of 5-ADAM which performs the ADAM update and evaluation 5 times - 5-ADAM will converge much faster than ADAM alone when measured in steps-to-convergence).