Million Instructions Per Second

The term is commonly used in association with a numeric value such as thousand instructions per second (kIPS), '''million instructions per second (MIPS)''', or '''Million Operations per Second (MOPS)'''.

THOUSAND INSTRUCTIONS PER SECOND

A thousand instructions per second (kIPS) is rarely used, as most current microprocessors can execute several million instructions per second. The ''thousand'' means 1000 not 1024.

kIPS is also a common joke name for 16 bit microprocessor designs developed in undergraduate computer engineering courses that use the text ''Computer Organization and Design'' by Patterson and Hennessy (ISBN 1-55860-428-6), which explains computer architecture concepts in terms of the MIPS Architecture . Such architectures tend to be scaled down versions of the MIPS R2000 architecture.

MILLION INSTRUCTIONS PER SECOND

Critics of the term refer to it as "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed" or "Meaningless Information on Performance for Salespeople." In Linux and UNIX circles MIPS are often referred to as '' BogoMIPS ''. MIPS are certainly not comparable between CPU Architecture s.

The floating-point arithmetic equivalent of MIPS is '' FLOPS '', to which the same cautions apply.

In the 1970s, minicomputer performance was compared using '' VAX MIPS'', where computers were measured on a task and their performance rated against the VAX 11/780 that was marketed as a "1 MIPS" machine. (The measure was also known as the "VAX Unit of Performance" or ''VUP''. Though orthographically incorrect, the "S" in "VUPs" is sometimes written in upper case.)

Most 8-bit and early 16-bit Microprocessors have a performance measured in '' KIPS '' ( Thousand instructions per second), which equals 0.001 MIPS.
The first general purpose Microprocessor , the Intel i8080, ran at 640 KIPS.
The Intel i8086 microprocessor, the first 16-bit microprocessor in the line of processors made by Intel and used in IBM PC s, ran at 800 KIPS. Early 32-bit PCs (386) ran at about 3 MIPS.

''zMIPS'' refers to the MIPS measure used internally by IBM to rate its Mainframe servers ( ZSeries and System Z9 ). Analyst firm Isham Research has lately coined the term ''kMIPS'' (kilo-million instructions per second) to measure the processor speeds in IBM's largest servers.

TIMELINE OF INSTRUCTIONS PER SECOND

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