This morning’s Observer column…

MIPS is to computer geeks what BHP (brake horse-power) is to Jeremy Clarkson. It is an acronym for ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second’, a measure of the speed of a central processing unit (CPU). Mips measures raw CPU performance, but not overall system performance, which is determined by lots of factors (such as disk speed and data in and out of Ram) so it would be foolish to use it as the only measure of how powerful your computer is. But Mips is an interesting indicator none the less….