Central processing unit
Even very complicated programs can be made by combining many simple instructions like these. This is possible because each instruction takes a very short time to happen. Many CPUs today can do more than 1 billion (1,000,000,000) instructions in a single second. In general, the more a CPU can do in a given time, the faster it is. One way to measure a processor's speed is MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). Flops (Floating-point operations per second) and CPU clock speed (usually measured in gigahertz) are also ways to measure how much work a processor can do in a certain time.