million instructions per second
- noun
- Specialized
:
millón de instrucciones por segundo
- During tests, the CPU achieved a remarkable speed of 200million instructions per second.
- over 100 million instructions per second
Examples
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The new processor can execute 250million instructions per second, significantly improving performance.
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On top of this, computer processing speed has risen from 1 million instructions per second to over 100 MIPS.
Academic text (1992) -
Our brain waves are busy processing about 100 million instructions per second (MIPS) as we multitask, organizing, coordinating, and facilitating our daily objectives.
Blog text (3) -
Modern computers often operate at speeds exceeding 1million instructions per second.
Synonyms
1
8.5
A measure of how many instructions a processor can do in one second, where one unit is one million instructions
Surface Forms
Morphology
million + instruction + per + second
The phrase is fully compositional: 'million' (1,000,000) + 'instructions' (program operations) + 'per' (for each) + 'second' (time unit) directly yields a rate of operations executed each second. Although 'instruction' is somewhat technical, the 'X per Y' numeric construction is transparent and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can infer the meaning.
Etymology
The term million instructions per second gives a simple picture: imagine a tiny worker following one instruction at a time and doing a lot, a million, in the time of one second. That's why the phrase tells us the computer processor's 'speed' — how many instructions it can do in one second.