Ghz to MIPS? Rough estimate anyone?

Question

From the research I have done so far I learned that there the MIPS is highly dependent upon the application being run, or the language.

But can anyone give me their best guess for a 2.5 Ghz computer in MIPS? Or any other number of Ghz?

C++ if that helps.

Answer 1

MIPS stands for "Million Instructions Per Second", but that value becomes difficult to calculate for modern computers. Many processor architectures (such as x86 and x86_64, which make up most desktop and laptop computers) fall into the CISC category of processors. CISC architectures often contain instructions that perform several different tasks at once. One of the consequences of this is that some instructions take more clock cycles than other instructions. So even if you know your clock frequency (in this case 2.5 gigahertz), the number of instructions run per second depends mostly on which instructions a program uses. For this reason, MIPS has largely fallen out of use as a performance metric.

Answer 2

For some of my many benchmarks, identified in

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/

I produce an assembly code listing from which actual assembler instructions used can be calculated (Note that these are not actual micro instructions used by the RISC processors). The following includes %MIPS/MHz calculations based on these and other MIPS assumptions.

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/cpuspeed.htm

The results only apply for Intel CPUs. You will see that MIPS results depend on whether CPU, cache or RAM data is being used. For a modern CPU at 2500 MHz, likely MIPS are between 1250 and 9000 using CPU/L1 cache but much less accessing data in RAM. Then there are SSE SIMD integer instructions. Real integer MIPS for simple register based additions are in:

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whatcpu%20results.htm#anchorC2D

Where my 2.4 GHz Core 2 CPU is shown to run at up to 17531 MIPS.

Roy