Content originally posted in LPCWare by starblue on Thu Mar 26 01:38:25 MST 2015
Quote: Mori_64
Quote: starblue
The reference for MIPS is the VAX 11/780, a machine from DEC in the early eighties. So it just means that an ARM Cortex M4 can do about 1.25 times as much computation per clock as that machine.
Actually the reference to clocks is wrong as the VAX ran at 5MHz clock rate.
Rather an ARM Cortex-M4 can do in one clock cycle the amount of computation that corresponds to 1.25 VAX 11/780 instructions. Since the ARM does somewhat less than one instructions per clock (most instructions take one cycle and they aren't executed in parallel), one ARM instruction can do more work than one VAX instruction.