bogomips

Bogomips is a measurement provided in the Linux operating system that indicates in a relative way how fast the computer processor runs. The program that provides the measurement is called BogoMips. Written by Linus Torvalds, the main developer of Linux, BogoMips can indicate when you boot a computer whether the system options have been specified for optimum performance. You compare the bogomips for your computer with what they ought to be for your computer's particular type of processor. Torvalds named the program BogoMips (for "bogus (or fake) MIPs") to suggest that performance measurements between two computers can be misleading because not all contributing factors are stated or even understood. Although MIPS (millions of instructions per second) has been frequently used in computer benchmarks, it's agreed that the variation of context tends to make the measurement misleading. Bogomips measures how many times the processor goes through a particular programming loop in a second.

BogoMIPS is built into some versions of Linux. It also exists as a stand-alone application program that you can download from certain Web sites. In July, 2004, Wintermute, a self-declared hacker site, reported that its server had achieved 3578.26 bogomips on a computer with an AMD Athlon microprocessor operating at 1,792 MHz.

the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing.