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MIPS

(Million Instructions Per Second) The execution speed of a computer. For example, .5 MIPS is 500,000 instructions per second; 100 MIPS is a hundred million instructions per second. MIPS was a popular rating before computers reached gigahertz speeds, but MIPS rates were never uniform. Some were best-case mixes while others were averages. In addition, it takes more instructions in one machine to do the same thing as another (RISC vs. CISC, mainframe vs. PC). As a result, MIPS has been called "MisInformation to Promote Sales" as well as "Meaningless Interpretation of Processor Speed." See also MIPS Technologies.

MIPS and MHz
There is a mathematical relationship between MIPS and MHz. You can derive MIPS from MHz if you know how many machine cycles it takes to execute an instruction in the CPU. For example, a 486 takes 1.9 cycles on average. To obtain MIPS on a 50 MHz 486, you would divide 50 by 1.9, yielding 26 MIPS (rather paltry by today's standards).

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MIPS

(computer science)

million instructions per second

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1.	(unit, benchmark)	MIPS - Million instructions per second. The unit commonly used to give the rate at which a processor executes instructions. Often rendered by hackers as "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed" or in other unflattering ways. This expresses a nearly universal attitude about the value of most benchmark claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural divides between hackers and marketroids. The etymologically incorrect singular "1 MIP" is sometimes heard. See also KIPS and GIPS.
2.		MIPS - VAX MIPS.
3.	(processor)	MIPS - Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages.
4.	(company)	MIPS - MIPS Technologies, Inc.