MIPS

[nickbrookes]

I'm doing a presentation at work about our mainframe, and someone has told me it runs at 430 mips. Fine so far. I would like to compare this to the average bog standard desktop pc, but can't find out how many mips these can do.

Can someone give be a guestimate ball park figure?

 

[DorothyDix]

As you should be aware,there is no such thing as a "BOG STANDARD" dektop PC. Go here

http://www.tomshardware.com

There are plenty of in depth hardware comparisons and reviews you could use,along with comprehensive benchmarks.



Hope it helps


CYA

PAUL (Dorothy Dix)

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Since processors are measured in Megaherz (millions of clock cycles per second), it used to be fair to say that a processor performs one instruction per clock cycle. It gets a bit messy when you consider multipliers, pipelines and suchlike, but I'd guess it's a fair starting point.

In real life, though, this doesn't happen due to the considerations I mentioned. Here's a potted Intel history segment so you get the idea;

http://www.lowendpc.com/tech/486.shtml

...so it's probably not fair to say that a 1Ghz Processor runs at 1 BIP.

Bear in mind that most Cray supercomputer processors were purposefully designed to have low MIPs so that they could concentrate on the more important floating-point calculations. Compare a Sun Sparc computer running at 200Mhz with a Pentium of the same rating. The Sun leaves the Pentium at the starting post.

As you can probably tell by now, MIPS is an inexact science made harder to calculate by processor designers trying to achieve different things.

Reference

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/glossary_e.html

http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20010611S0124

...and for fun

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/MIPS.html

CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[CitrixEngineer]

...oh, and to bring it up to date, there's this

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/imgbank/pdf/173/173.reviews.athlonwhitebox.pdf

CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[ceh4702]

Figuring out MIPS is dependent on memory and CPU speed among other things. You have to figure out how much time is spent accessing memory and how much time is spent executing instructions. Most processors are idle more than they are working.

As an example to figure this out you have to know the average Clock Cycles per instruction. Then you have to figure out how many you can do in a second. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[ceh4702]

I may have a formula for MIPS in a book. It might have a breakdown of mips for average computers. It is a book on operating system design. This is the only class I dropped. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.