For those interested in a Prime "Benchmark"...

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

Althrough mips usually refers to millions instructions per seconds, a lot of the early mips mesurements programs that I have seen in the past did assume that some operations, like multiplications were not CPU instructions and took multiple instructions cycles to execute.

Similary, all these programs (even the more modern onces) assume that a statement like this one:
a= b+c<<d;
is 3 instructions.

However the Prime CPU does have a 32*32=64 bit multiplication instruction (which will take between 1 and 3 cycles to execute) and can execute an add + shift with result stored somewhere else in one single instructions (an intel chip would need 3 of them).

All this together might explain why the 400Mhz chip might clock 440 mips on some benchmarks.

Cyrille