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what’s a teraflop
- Thread starter Papa
- Start date
Dr.brain64
Member
Mega
Giga
Tera
Kind of like...
Million
Billion
Trillion
Flops
Giga
Tera
Kind of like...
Million
Billion
Trillion
Flops
Punished Miku
Gold Member
Other than Dreams, you mean.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I'm a teraflop.
Hero Of Gallowmere
Member
It's a thing that makes your favorite plastic box go vroom vroom really fast.
Trimesh
Banned
OK, but I get to specify the (non-uniform) value of N everyone uses!
Cato
Banned
For people that are serious about compute power, I would say daxpy is more important than tflops.
Rayderism
Member
It means games that are REALLY bad and sold poorly. Teraflops is short for a category games that are "terrible flops", or trillions of terrible's per second.
Actually, it means "trillions of floating point operations per second" (you have to include the "S".....teraflops), but my definition is funnier, even if it is technically incorrect.
Actually, it means "trillions of floating point operations per second" (you have to include the "S".....teraflops), but my definition is funnier, even if it is technically incorrect.
dangopee
Neo Member
It's just a buzzword. A trillion floating-point operations per second? What operation? For example, floating-point division is much slower with much worse throughput than addition subtraction and multiplication.
Architecture also matters a lot. Remember when Sony said the PS3 GPU had 1.8 TFLOPs? Really? So surely the PS3 GPU was roughly as fast as the PS4 GPU which had 1.84 TFLOPs right? It's bullshit. FLOPage comparisons are really only meaningful if the two processing units being compared have the same architecture. So even if the PS5 has 9 TFLOPs or 12 or whatever, that number is not directly comparable to the FLOPs of the PS4 and PS4 Pro for example. Not even the FLOP numbers of AMD and Nvidia cards can be meaningfully compared. So saying that the 12 TFLOP XSX GPU is equivalent to a Nvidia 2080 Super just based on that number is also bullshit. The only way to see how it compares is to benchmark it.
Architecture also matters a lot. Remember when Sony said the PS3 GPU had 1.8 TFLOPs? Really? So surely the PS3 GPU was roughly as fast as the PS4 GPU which had 1.84 TFLOPs right? It's bullshit. FLOPage comparisons are really only meaningful if the two processing units being compared have the same architecture. So even if the PS5 has 9 TFLOPs or 12 or whatever, that number is not directly comparable to the FLOPs of the PS4 and PS4 Pro for example. Not even the FLOP numbers of AMD and Nvidia cards can be meaningfully compared. So saying that the 12 TFLOP XSX GPU is equivalent to a Nvidia 2080 Super just based on that number is also bullshit. The only way to see how it compares is to benchmark it.
Cato
Banned
Agree. Flops is mostly meaningless since it is so disconnected from what the workload is.
Traditionally, flops used to be a measure of how many floating point multiplications you could do.
As a compromise between the much cheaper additions and the much more expensive divisions (not to mention logarithms, ...)
At least in the hpc and super computer world it is completely meaningless and will just make people shake their heads if you start talking about it.
Now that flops are important selling points to low end end user consumer hardware things got even worse,
it would not surprise me at all if shitty vendors have re-defined it to be how many additions they can do instead.
Just so they can inflate a meaningless number and impress ignorant consumers and fanbois.
For real serious compute power on big-compute, the real measure that people actually care about is much more domain specific.
For example, for math, matrix multiplications, vectors, fem computations, etc
no one cares about a meaningless flops number. Here you would have a different domain specific measure called "daxpy".
Other types of compute intensive workloads have other types of domain specific measures of compute power.
In all of these domains, the flops number is completely meaningless.
The only people that care about flops are laymen and fanbois that do not understand it is a meaningless metric.
It is a meaningless marketing term to fool people that do not know better.
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Elektro Demon
Banned
_Spr_Drnk
Banned
I've just come back after 3 or 4 years away, and this place is very different. E: For instance, I don't think the OP would have been left up on the old neogaf for long.
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trikster40
Member
Did you know that teraflops were around even in Biblical days? The great apostle Paul wrote this in 1 Corinthians 13:1 (NTV New Technology Version):
If I speak in the tongues of haptic feedback or of backwards comparability, but do not have 12 teraflops, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of ray-tracing and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a GPU that can move mountains, but do not have 12 teraflops, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to AI and give over my SSD to reduce loading that I may boast, but do not have 12 teraflops, I gain nothing.
If I speak in the tongues of haptic feedback or of backwards comparability, but do not have 12 teraflops, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of ray-tracing and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a GPU that can move mountains, but do not have 12 teraflops, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to AI and give over my SSD to reduce loading that I may boast, but do not have 12 teraflops, I gain nothing.
What you really want to ask is what is a floating point operation. The Tera just means it's a trillion, that part is easy.
A basic way to understand a floating point operation is that it's a math problem involving decimals; the problem is not just integers
example: FLOP: 2.34+5.555589 vs Integer: 2+5
The problem with the decimals is harder and a gpu can do it better than a cpu. The xbox can now do 12 trillion math problems involving decimals in every second.
Impressed?
A basic way to understand a floating point operation is that it's a math problem involving decimals; the problem is not just integers
example: FLOP: 2.34+5.555589 vs Integer: 2+5
The problem with the decimals is harder and a gpu can do it better than a cpu. The xbox can now do 12 trillion math problems involving decimals in every second.
Impressed?
darkinstinct
...lacks reading comprehension.
Wii U is a teraflop.
M1chl
Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Well if it would be the case, P4 would be still king. You need to take account how many processing units you have, how efficient your pipeline is, bandwidth, cache, etc...
Not exactly they sell them a lot when it was 99USD and it's not like it cost that much to produce.
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PleaseDontBanMe
Banned
It's a flip flop with a tear in it
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kraspkibble
Permabanned.
the weapon of choice for this peasant console war.
ThaMonkeyClaw
Member
WRONG! That's a petaflop!
FloatingIslands
Member
It's a bad performance measuring method
molasar
Banned
It is not about a flop size but it is about getting a job done even if Sony's ain't nothing special.
Trevor explains it better in this video clip.
EverydayBeast
thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
At the end of the day the casual gamer doesn't care to know what a teraflop is.
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![[Asmodean]](/data/avatars/m/123/123312.jpg?1526393694){kind=avatar}
[Asmodean]
Member
Wikipedia explanations and memes aside. If anyone is interested in a more straightforward example: Essentially it is how many operations in floating point precision (typically for FP32-bit precision) that the GPU can perform each second.. Which is lately used as an on-paper metric for how powerful a GPU is. Which is ok I guess, but there are far more important aspects to how well a GPU will perform.. such as architecture and node size, etc.
The OPS of FLOPS is after the 'human' code is turned into GPU assembly. it is compiled and costs a certain number of Operations(OPS) to perform, depending on what is being done, etc.
The OPS of FLOPS is after the 'human' code is turned into GPU assembly. it is compiled and costs a certain number of Operations(OPS) to perform, depending on what is being done, etc.
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