And why would 16-bit PICs be interesting? A PIC16 is rated at 5MIPs and the fastest PIC18s are rated 16MIPs (typically 10MIPs). The 16-bit PIC24/dsPIC are rated from 16-40MIPs. However, MIPs (million-instructions/second) are very misleading and do not not take into account things like instruction and data sizes. So how, for example, does a 10MIPs PIC18F97J60 compare to a 16MIPs PIC24FJ64GA004 - is the PIC24FJ 1.6x faster? In real world testing and benchmarking, it is more like 13-23x. Comparing PIC32s which are rated at 40-80MIPs, the disparity gets even larger. Instead of 4-8x that of a PIC18, it can be as much 160x. Take a look at the CoreMark figures (last column) in the table below.





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