Page "Central processing unit" Paragraph 61

Many reported IPS values have represented " peak " execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches, whereas realistic workloads consist of a mix of instructions and applications, some of which take longer to execute than others.

The performance of the memory hierarchy also greatly affects processor performance, an issue barely considered in MIPS calculations.

Because of these problems, various standardized tests, often called " benchmarks " for this purpose — such as SPECint – have been developed to attempt to measure the real effective performance in commonly used applications.