How to Measure System Performance

1
How to Measure System Performance

• There are a number of tests to determine how fast
  a computer can processes data

• These include
• Clock Speed
• MIPS
• FLOPS
• Application Based Tests

2
Clock Speed
The clock speed is the frequency of which the
clock generates pulses. One pulse is called a
clock cycle. These pulses are measured in MHz or
GHz. 1 MHz 1 million pulses per second 1GHz
1000 MHz
Good measure of performance? It gives a good
indication of processor performance but other
factors such as data bus width are also important.
MIPS
Millions of Instructions per Second is a test to
see how many instructions can be processed in one
second. (This may be up to one billion!)
Good measure of performance? It does not play
any importance on the complexity and size of
instructions being processed so can only be
described as a rough guide.
3
FLOPS
Floating Point Operations Per Second measures how
many floating point instructions are processed
in a second.
Good measure of performance? Better than MIPs as
most instructions are arithmetical and therefore
use floating point.
Application Based tests
Benchmark or Application based tests set out a
series of practical tasks using standard
applications and measure performance then make
comparisons.
Good measure of performance? The only test that
actually gives evidence