Everyone who owns a PC perhaps knows about the 7-Zip archiving tool that can be used to extract the files from a large number of archiving formats like ZIP or 7Z etc. It can also be used to pack and compress the files into these archives. But very few people know that the 7-Zip also comes with a bench-marking tool built inside it. The bench-marking is done through the LZMA compression and decompression. The tool checks how fast your CPU is able to process the compression and decompression instructions.
The LZMA stands for the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain Algorithm which is used for the lossless compression of the data. 7-Zip uses some dummy data and then uses the LZMA to compress/decompress it for the benchmark. The benchmark ratings are displayed in terms of MIPS (million instructions per second). The benchmark tool calculates the ratings from the data processing sped and then converts them into the equivalent values for the Intel Core 2 Duo processor without the multi-threading option being used. This basically means that the values displayed will be as close to the real clock frequency of the CPU in terms of MHz.
You can start the 7-Zip bench-marking tool simply by selecting Tools → Benchmark from the menubar. The benchmark tool window will open and will instantly start working. So you should close all the other programs before you start the bench-marking. You should also close any of the background programs that could be consuming a lot of memory from your PC. This is important because the benchmark depends a lot on the available RAM (and also on the RAM clock frequency).
The results are displayed in MIPS and you can compare your CPU’s performance with that of the other people’s using the 7-Zip official website http://www.7-cpu.com/.