MIPS
MIPS may refer to any of the following:
1. Short for microprocessor without interlocked pipelined stages, MIPS is a microprocessor architecture using the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) instruction set, introduced in 1985. It began as a research project led by John Hennessey at Stanford University in 1981 and is developed by MIPS technologies, a US technology manufacturer. It was designed for embedded devices such as the Nintendo 64 game console, which featured a MIPS R4300i CPU (central processing unit).
A specialized version of the MIPS processor, MIPS-X, was developed in tandem at Stanford. MIPS-X is used in embedded devices such as DVD (digital versatile disc) players.
2. Short for millions of instructions per second, MIPS is the approximate number of instructions a CPU can execute in one second. For example, the Intel 80386 (386) computer processor could perform more than five million instructions every second (5 MIPS).