MIPS

MIPS (millions of instructions per second)

Used in defining digital signal processing capabilities. (Cingular)

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 architectures.

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.) This was chosen because the 11/780 was roughly equivalent in performance to an IBM System/370 model 158-3, which was commonly accepted in the computing industry as running at 1 MIPS.