Thousand Instructions Per Second
Before standard benchmarks were available, average speed rating of computers was based on calculations for a mix of instructions with the results given in kilo Instructions Per Second (kIPS). The most famous was the Gibson Mix, produced by Jack Clark Gibson of IBM for scientific applications. Other ratings were also produced for commercial applications. Computer Speeds From Instruction Mixes pre-1960 to 1971 has results for around 175 computers, providing scientific and commercial ratings. For IBM, the earliest Gibson Mix calculations shown are the 1954 IBM 650 at 0.06 kIPS and 1956 IBM 705 at 0.5 kIPS. The results are mainly for IBM and others known as the BUNCH — Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell.
A thousand instructions per second (kIPS) is rarely used, as most current microprocessors can execute at least a billion instructions per second. The thousand means 1000, not 1024.
kIPS is also a common joke name for 16 bit microprocessor designs developed in undergraduate computer engineering courses that use the text Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy (ISBN 1-55860-428-6), which explains computer architecture concepts in terms of the MIPS architecture. Such architectures tend to be scaled down versions of the MIPS R2000 architecture.
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