Computer speed units

[NeoGen]

I'm sorry guys, I know this may sound a bit naive but, I'd appreciate it if anyone could clarify me about the current speed measurement units for computers.
My doubts are about MIPS. I know that "MIPS" means millions of instructions per second, but what I don't know is how many MIPS does my computer achieve for example (AMD Athlon XP 2000+)... I don't have a clue.
And another thing is that I've been seeing on criptography sites and stuff another speed unit that looks like the last one. I've seen "MIP-Years", which supposedly means the number of millions of instructions per second in a year. That should be a gigantic number, right? I mean, a computer running at full speed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, that should be alot of processing power...
But on the other hand I've heard that cracking the old RSA-100 contest took 7 MIP-Years, and supposedly that's "trivial" nowadays? (The "trivial" I saw on another website which had the mip-years for the several contests)
So... "trivial" here means what? It can be done in a few hours on a modern pc?
These speed measuring units do confuse me... if anyone could shed some light on the matter, it would be greatly appreciated.


Keep up the good work on those DC projects people!
I'll try to keep up too. :)

[Bionic_Redneck]

I think what they mean by trival is that it's not very difficult to do. Using mips to determine processor speed in not very accurate. FLOPS is a much better way of telling actual computing power it stand for Floating Point Operation Per Seconds there is also mflops and gigaflops. for windows sissoft make sandra benchmark that does give you the FPU of your processor

people with linux can do 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' and one of the values is bogomips. I think linux tests how many mips cpu has at time of boot and thats the bogomips mine is 3026 with astock XP1800+