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Teraflops What are they, what do they measure and what is their use in computing?

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do you know the teraflop concept? Have you ever been told about it when advising you to buy a device?

This, like some others, serves to refer to the performance they have. However, they are not used often, it is not something that the user notices, simply, out of sheer ignorance.

To avoid it, today we are going to discover what the teraflops is, where it comes from and what it is used for.

What are Teraflops and what are they for? (Floating Point Operations per Second)Teraflops What are they, what do they measure and what is their use?

Although of the following, surely Teraflops Whatever the concept that sounds familiar to you, the truth is that this is nothing more than an amplification of the flopsjust as there are others such as Gigaflops, Teraflops or Petaflopswhich we will see below.



flops

We start by stating that FLOPS is an acronym for the concept Floating Point Operations per Second. that is, “floating point operations per second“. This refers to the performance of a hardware element.

That is, the number of scientific operations that the apparatus is capable of performing in one second. It occurs in scientific numbering, since, in general, we speak of high amounts of it, for which we use a word with a prefix to refer, precisely, to a greater number of FLOPS.

Thus, we see that this concept is nothing more than a representation of the capacity of the machine. We find that there are two types of FLOPS:

  • the of Current FLOPSwhich would correspond to the result of performing a measurement of a piece of equipment or a part at a certain moment of its use.
  • the of Sustained FLOPS.

This means that, the more FLOPS of a device, the higher its performancesomething that interests, above all, those who work with these and require that this be maximum.

Even so, this characteristic is not usually enough to be able to dismiss or not a team, since there are other performance factors to consider such as ES, cache coherence, interprocessor communication, memory hierarchy.

flop units

Gigaflops or GFLOPS

A gigaflops is a unit designated to speak of 10000000000 –109 or ten billion) flops.

Teraflops or TFLOPS

In this case we would have a measurement in billions of flops because a teraflops equals 10000000000000 flops (1012) and a thousand gigaflops. For this reason, it is commonly used in measurements of huge computer systems.

We can say that a graphics card Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 It offers a performance of 9 teraflops, which is nine thousand gigaflops.

Petaflops or PFLOPS



The petaflops is the unit to talk about thousand teraflopsone million gigaflops or one billion flops (10fifteen flops).

An example of a device whose performance is measured in petaflops is the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which returns 33 petaflops, or 330000000000000000-flops.

Other units of measure flops

The above are the most used units, although we find even larger ones such as those that include the prefixes “ex-“, “zetta-” Y “yotta-” followed by the root “flops”. These refer to 101810twenty-one and 1024 flops respectively.

On the other hand, we find concepts that refer to smaller amounts of flops such as kiloflops or megaflopswhich are 103 and 106 flops.

Teraflops and the world of game consoles

As usual, the concept used in video games is the teraflops to refer to the computational power required by the hardware to run the software that is running

To obtain this approach to the performance of a device, the flops of the CPU and the GPU that compose it are added. Some examples are the 1.31 tflops that the XBox One has, the 6 for the XBox One X version, the 1.84 tflops of the PlayStation4, the 500 gflops of the Nintendo Switch or a mid-range computer, which can be around 3.5 tflops.

How to know how many teraflops my computer or console has?

This information does not appearas many others do, in the menus of your devicesnot even the most spectacular.

The way to know the teraflops of your devices is know the model of its parts and search this informationeither on the website of each manufacturer (or even asking them directly) or on the website: Gflops.surge.sh where you will find all this fully updated value information.

We do have to say, yes, that the information provided by the brands will generally be that of the GFLOPS in hardware with stock speedalthough, the usual thing is that we are left without knowing what is the case with overlockthat is, when it is forced, yielding.

To get this information you can use this simple formula:

calculate flops in overclock

Hardware