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

Teraflops What are they

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

To avoid this, today we will discover what teraflops is, where it comes from and what it is used for .

Flops

Let’s start by indicating that FLOPS is an acronym for the Floating Point Operations per Second concept. that is, “ floating point operations per second “. This refers to the performance of a hardware item.

That is, the number of scientific operations that the device is capable of performing in a second . It is given in scientific numbering, because, in general, we talk about high amounts of it, for which we use a word with prefix to refer precisely to a greater amount of FLOPS.

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

  • The one of Current FLOPS , which would correspond to the result of measuring a piece of equipment or a piece at a certain moment of its use.
  • Sustained FLOPS.

This means that, the greater the amount of FLOPS of a device, the greater its performance will be , something that is of interest, above all, to those who work with them and require that this be maximum. >

Even so, this feature is usually not enough to be able to dismiss a team or not, as there are other performance factors that must be considered as ES, cache consistency, interprocessor communication, memory hierarchy .

unidades de flops

Gigaflops or GFLOPS

A gigaflops is a unit designated to talk about 10000000000 – 10 9 or ten billion) flops.

Teraflops or TFLOPS

In this case we would have a measurement in billions of flops because a teraflops is equivalent to 10000000000000 flops (10 12 ) and a thousand gigaflops . For this reason, it is usual to use it in measurements of huge computer systems.

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

Petaflops or PFLOPS

The petaflops is the unit to talk about a thousand teraflops , a million gigaflops or a billion flops ( 10 15 flops ).

An example of an element whose performance is measured in petaflops is the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which throws 33 petaflops, that is, 330000000000000000-00- flops.

Other units of measurement flops

The above are the most used units, although we find even larger ones, such as the prefixes “ exa- “, “ zetta- ” and ” yotta- »followed by the root« flops ». These refer to 10 18 , 10 21 and 10 24 flops respectively.

On the other hand, we find concepts that refer to smaller amounts of flops such as kiloflops or megaflops , which are 10 3 and 10 6 flops.

The Teraflops and the world of video consoles

In general, the concept used in video games is teraflops to refer to the computing power required by the hardware to run the software that is running.

In order to obtain this approach to the performance of a device, the CPU and GPU flops 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. / p>

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

This information does not appear , as many others do, in the menus of your devices , not even the most spectacular ones.

The way to know the teraflops of your devices is to know the model of its parts and search for this information , either 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 have to say, yes, that the information provided by the brands will be, in general, that of the GFLOPS in hardware with stock speed , although, the usual thing is that we run out of know what is the case with Overlock , that is, when it is forced, giving up.

To get this information you can use this simple formula:

calcular flops en overclock