A CPU's processing power is measured in ___________.
A CPU's processing power is measured in MIPS.
MIPS - Million instructions per second. Million instructions per second (MIPS) is an older, obsolete measure of a computer's speed and power, MIPS measures roughly the number of machine instructions that a computer can execute in one second.
The number of MIPS (million instructions per second) is a general measure of computing performance and, by implication, the amount of work a larger computer can do. For large servers or mainframes, MIPS is a way to measure the cost of computing: the more MIPS delivered for the money, the better the value.
Under ideal circumstances, a high-end desktop x86 processor can execute over 100 billion instructions per second. In real world usage scenarios, however, the CPU is often stuck waiting for other components to answer back, mostly RAM and disk.