Just for reference's sake this does vary a fair bit by computer and browser - mine never drops below ~8kIPS and runs mostly at ~15kIPS (and up to ~23kIPS).

Whilst this is nothing like the several orders of magnitude required for more capable interactive behaviour, it does make my load times noticeably faster than those claimed on the page. :)

(I'm Chrome on Linux, i7 4th Gen, incidentally)

I'm getting here > speed 1640kIPS on the old Nexus 7, don't you mean 8kkIPS?

(This value was the average while booting Linux)

psst, the SI prefix for 10^6 is M

You mean to say, 10^7 isn't KKK?

Absolutely so, yes. Thanks. :)

8 - 23 MIPS ain't so bad, right?

For reference, that's about as fast as a Motorola 68030 @50MHz [1] which was used in the AppleIIx, and while that was no slouch when it was released, you wouldn't want to run a modern development environment on such a machine either ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68030

A little faster than an Arduino and a little slower than a PIC24. Not too bad.

Dynamic translation of x86 sequences could give you some boost, as could use of asm.js.

Some things would do badly at that speed. But serving basic web queries would be fine, and give you a better feel for what is slow when milliseconds spent processing turn into actual seconds.