What is "bogomips"

BogoMips (from "bogus" and MIPS) is an unscientific measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel when it boots to calibrate an internal busy-loop. An oft-quoted definition of the term is "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing".

BogoMips is a value that can be used to verify whether the processor in question is in the proper range of similar processors, i.e. BogoMips represents a processor's clock frequency as well as the potentially present CPU cache. It is not usable for performance comparison between different CPUs.