MIPS is a number people use to say how fast a computer works. It stands for “million instructions per second”: one MIPS means the machine can carry out about a million tiny steps in one second. Computer people used it a lot when they compared older chips. Though actually it is only a rough score. Two machines with the same MIPS are not always equally useful, because those “instructions” are not all the same size of job, and a machine that looks fast on paper can still feel slow at the work you care about. In writing you almost always see it in capital letters: MIPS.