DMIPS is Dhrystone MIPS. To help understand the meaning of this name, let’s divide it into two words and start with a short explanation of what MIPS (million instructions per second) is, then try to get more familiar with the meaning of Dhrystone.
MIPS is a way to assess the speed and power of a computer by measuring the average number of instructions (expressed in millions) executed within a single second. When calculating MIPS, an important thing is to remember that different instructions require different times to be executed due to their complexity. Another factor that may have an impact on the resulting number of instructions executed within a second is the quality of I/O speed. However, MIPS always refers only to the speed of the CPU, not taking into account the other reasonable conditions which may influence the result. The fact that the high or low MIPS rating of a computer does not give any certainty your device will handle an application quicker or not suggests that MIPS cannot be taken as a meaningful and reliable source of information about the actual performance of our device.
Dhrystone (D) – a synthetic computing benchmark program, designed to help assess the performance of a processor (CPU). The Dhrystone test was designed with the following idea: its basis is a standard loop of synthetic code, which imitates various operations in algorithms of a computer. DMIPS stands for Dhrystone MIPS, in which the Dhrystone score must be divided by 1757 (1 MIPS machine or the number of Dhrystones in a second). This way of measuring the performance of a computer processor is much more meaningful and reliable than MIPS. By dividing the result of the above calculation by the frequency of a particular CPU, you can obtain another number expressed in DMIPS/MHz, which can be really useful when you want to compare the performance of your CPU at different clock speeds.
To sum up, the main difference, next to the fact that DMIPS uses the Dhrystone program for its calculations, is the result which suggests the actual work that can be done by a CPU, not just the speed. DMIPS takes into account many variables and thus it is more architecture independent.
MIPS is a way to assess the speed and power of a computer by measuring the average number of instructions (expressed in millions) executed within a single second. When calculating MIPS, an important thing is to remember that different instructions require different times to be executed due to their complexity. Another factor that may have an impact on the resulting number of instructions executed within a second is the quality of I/O speed. However, MIPS always refers only to the speed of the CPU, not taking into account the other reasonable conditions which may influence the result. The fact that the high or low MIPS rating of a computer does not give any certainty your device will handle an application quicker or not suggests that MIPS cannot be taken as a meaningful and reliable source of information about the actual performance of our device.
Dhrystone (D) – a synthetic computing benchmark program, designed to help assess the performance of a processor (CPU). The Dhrystone test was designed with the following idea: its basis is a standard loop of synthetic code, which imitates various operations in algorithms of a computer. DMIPS stands for Dhrystone MIPS, in which the Dhrystone score must be divided by 1757 (1 MIPS machine or the number of Dhrystones in a second). This way of measuring the performance of a computer processor is much more meaningful and reliable than MIPS. By dividing the result of the above calculation by the frequency of a particular CPU, you can obtain another number expressed in DMIPS/MHz, which can be really useful when you want to compare the performance of your CPU at different clock speeds.
To sum up, the main difference, next to the fact that DMIPS uses the Dhrystone program for its calculations, is the result which suggests the actual work that can be done by a CPU, not just the speed. DMIPS takes into account many variables and thus it is more architecture independent.
