I'm not sure I believe that. What are you really saying here? There are PLENTY of MCU's in the "CHIPS" list that take 12, 6, or 4 clocks per machine cycle, and it's quite a reach to assume one instruction takes one machine cycle. I'd guess, if I were given to guessing at such things, that it's closer to two machine cycles per instruction, since a large share of commonly used instructions take longer than one machine cycle.

It's important to make the distinction between machine cycles and oscillator cycles. Most 805x MCU's operate at an oscillator frequency far in excess of that 10 MHz that's the subject of this thread. However, only a few are actually capable, despite the claims of their manufacturers' marketing departments, of exceeding 10 MIPS. It's possible to write code snippets that approach MIPS per oscillator MHz, but there's a considerable difference between a string of NOP's (that's how "MIPS" is classically measured) and useful code.

RE