MIPS
- MIPS
- 1. Million Instructions Per Second. One means of expressing the processing
power of a computer.
Contributed by Kenneth Nellis.
- 2. "Mis-Information to Promote Sales" or
"Meaningless Interpretation of Processor Speed." A deliberate
perversion of "Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS)", to
emphasise its flawed use as a means of comparing processing power of
different computers. This is due to a number of factors:
- Different processors may require a different number of clock cycles to perform the same instruction.
- On some processor architectures (principally CISC rather than RISC), different machine instructions require a different number of clock cycles. Therefore the measure would differ according to which instruction is used.
- The performance of a computer is dependent upon other factors than simply the processor, for instance bus architecture (speed and width), memory speed and architecture, disk and graphics performance etc.