Floating point operations per second, also known as FLOPS, are a way to measure the performance of a computer or graphics card . This measure mainly indicates the amount of operations of this type that the hardware processor can solve in a second by mixing small, large and even fractional numbers.
The FLOPS is a very small measure, so the developers now take TeraFLOPS as a reference to give the user the data. Thus, the higher this value, the better the computing power of the devices.
FLOPS have become a new standard that can be crucial when buying a computer device or game console. That is why in this post we will explain what they are, in what units they are measured and how we can know how many our device has.
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What are the FLOPS of my processor and GPU?
As we said at the beginning, FLOPS are floating point operations that can be performed by one CPU or GPU per second . They represent very large or very small numbers and account for the amount of workable operations. Current teams already use the Teraflops unit to be able to make billions of calculations per second.
This unit, at the beginning, was used to design the operations that supercomputers could do . Currently, these types of devices already use pentaflops that correspond to 1000 billion operations per second.
However, although this measure is important, when purchasing a computer we must also take into account the processor frequencies or the amount of RAM and ROM it has . A good set of all these elements will be the result of a powerful team, but if it exceeds any of the values too much without being in balance with the rest, nothing will do.
This concept also affects game consoles , so that the more teraflops they have, the better virtual universes they can offer to video game consumers. But, of course, and as with computers, this is not entirely true, since in the case of video consoles, drivers and graphics optimization are also important.
Flops types, measurements and units
Of course, we find different types and units to refer to this concept, so that we can always speak with ownership, being more accurate and using concepts that adapt to new capabilities than technology, always in constant evolution, is able to offer us.
Types
There are currently two types of FLOPS:
- Sustained FLOPS : Used to calculate the performance of a device based on the amount of flops it contains. In any case, it must be remembered that it is not a determining characteristic to acquire or not acquire a device.
- Current FLOPS : This is a measure of the number of operations that a team performs at the moment when it is being used.
Measures and units
The most commonly used measures that correspond to units of the flops are as follows:
- Kiloflops = One thousand flops
- Megaflops = One million flops
- Gigaflops (GFlops ) = One billion flops
- Teraflops (TFlops) = One billion flops = One thousand gigaflops
- Petaflops (PFlops) = One thousand billion flops = One thousand teraflops = One million gigaflops
- Exaflops = A trillion flops
- Zetaflops = A thousand trillion flops
- Yotaflops = A quadrillion of flops
As graphic examples, it can be said that a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 card has a performance of 9 teraflops or an i7-6700K processor has more or less 1.2 teraflops. In the case of petaflops, an example of a device that uses them is the supercomputer Tianhe-2 . It has 33 petaflops , although the world’s most powerful computer currently has 125 petaflops .
The concept used to measure video game capabilities in teraflops, where, for example, the Tegra X1 processor that has the Nintendo switch has a performance of 1 teraflop. The XBox One has 1.3115 Teraflops, the PlayStation 4 has 1,840 Teraflops and the PlayStation 4 Pro has a total of 4.2 Teraflops.
Thus, we see that is the teraflop that is used as a reference measure for video game developers , so that they can know how much computing power they can count for each platform.
How can I find out and calculate how many TeraFlops my computer has?
In order to locate how many teraflops or gigaflops has the device that interests us, we would just have to access Google and search for its name followed by the word flops. Although it is true that there are also several websites that you can access in order to know the data.
Some are so complete that they show you the information even in graphic form about the performance of the device you are interested in. It is likely that if you browse the manufacturer’s website (or even if you send them an email to ask them) you can locate this completely updated information because, as we have said, it is a value that increasingly interests the user and, therefore, the manufacturer will be happy to announce.
The information provided by the brands will consist of the Gigaflops in reference to hardware with stock speed . For this reason, we will remain without knowing the value when it is rendering (current flops), what is called overlock.
This is logical, because they should indicate the value in reference to the combination of the other components with which it works and this is not too operational at the same time as it is completely changing.
You may not be interested in doing this search for each device and you want to know if there is a simple operation with which you can calculate these values. Indeed, does exist and it is a mathematical formula that will result in Mflops .
In order to use it we have to have two data for each device we want to know. On the one hand, would be the shaders and on the other we would need the data of their clock speed . The formula is very easy. We must multiply both quantities with each other and once we have that result, we multiply it again by 2.
MFLOPS = Shaders * Clock * 2
This operation will give us the Megaflops that the device has, but, as the data that tells us more reality is the Teraflop, we would have to divide the resulting amount by a thousand and so we would change the unit.