To rephrase it, he thinks that he can figure out, in software, the number
    of MIPS of the machine he is running on.

You can come up with a "reasonable" guess as to clock speed on a PIC or
related processor by seeing how many instructions it will execute in
between watchdog timeouts (the WDT timer is normally a separate RC
controlled clock, I believe.)  You could probably get a bit closer with
a single resistor and cap connected to an IO pin, PERHAPS even using the
pin's inherent capacitance and leakage...

It depends how accurate he needs to be, and whether he's allowed to make
baseline measurements to compare to, and so on...

BillW

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