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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.

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