Performance and performance indicators
Microprocessors - Architectures and performances

Performance is measured using benchmarks. Benchmarks are programs, often of limited size, which are intended to be representative of application characteristics. There are different categories of benchmarks, depending on the class of application, and we will examine them below.

Processor performance has often been expressed in terms of Mips (millions of instructions per second). Such an evaluation is based on a standard sequence of machine instructions, each of which is weighted according...