To the end-user, the ultimate benefit of processor performance is how fast their applications run. Performance to them, simply put, is the amount of time it takes to perform a given task. With that in mind, the processor that performs a given task in the least amount of time has the highest performance. Increased performance implies reduced execution time. Historically, this has been measured through a variety of benchmarks. When comparing the performance of processors that execute the same instruction set, such as the x86 instruction set in PCs, performance is defined as: The work done by the processor in each clock cycle (represented as instructions per clock – IPC) times the number of clock cycles (represented by frequency) or: