Floating point operations per second, also known as FLOPS, are a way of measuring the performance of a computer or graphics card.. This measure mainly indicates the number 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 measurement, so developers currently reference TeraFLOPS to give the user the data. Thus, the higher this value, the better the computational 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 are going to explain what they are, in what units they are measured and how we can know how many our device has.
What are the FLOPS of my processor and GPU?
As we said at the beginning, FLOPS are the floating point operations that a CPU or GPU can perform per second. They represent very large or very small numbers and account for the number of operations that can be carried out. Current equipment already uses the unit to be able to make billions of calculations per second.
This unit, in its beginnings, was used to design the operations that could be done by . Currently, this type of device already uses the pentaflops that correspond to 1000 trillion operations per second.
In any case, although this measure is important, When buying a computer we must also take into account the frequencies of the processor or the amount of RAM and ROM memory it has. A good set of all these elements will result in a powerful team, but if you exceed any of the values too much without being in balance with the rest, it will not help.
This concept also affects game consoles, so 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 game consoles, drivers and graphics optimization are also important.
Types, measures and units of the Flops
Of course, we find different types and units to refer to this concept, so that we can always speak properly, being more accurate and using concepts that adapt to the new capabilities that technology, always in constant evolution, is capable of. offer us.
Types
There are currently two types of FLOPS:
- sustained flops: They are used to calculate the performance of a device based on the number of flops that contains. In any case, it must be remembered that it is not a determining characteristic to acquire or not a piece of equipment.
- current flops: It is about getting a measurement of the number of operations performed by a team at the moment in which it is being used.
measures and units
The most used measures and that correspond to units of the flops are the ones that appear below:
- kiloflops = thousand flops
- Megaflops = a million flops
- Gigaflops (GFlops) = billion flops
- Teraflops (TFlops) = One trillion flops = One thousand gigaflops
- Petaflops (PFlops) = One thousand trillion flops = One thousand teraflops = One million gigaflops
- exaflops = a trillion flops
- Zetaflops = A thousand trillion flops
- Yotaflops = A quadrillion flops
As graphic examples, it can be said that a card Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 it 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 Tianhe-2 supercomputer. This one has 33 petaflopsalthough the most powerful computer in the world currently has 125 petaflops.
The concept used to measure capabilities in video games in teraflops, where, for example, the Tegra X1 processor found in 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 it is the teraflop that is used as a reference measure for video game developersso they can know how much computational power they can count on for each platform.
How can I know 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 only have to access Google and search for its name followed by the word flops. Although it is true that There are several websites that you can access to find out the data.
Some are so complete that they show you the information even in the form of a graph 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 find this completely updated information because, as we have said, it is a value that is increasingly of interest to the user and, therefore, the manufacturer will be happy to introduce.
The information provided by the brands will consist of the Gigaflops referenced to stock speed hardware. For this reason, we are going to be left without knowing the value when it is yielding (current flops), which 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 very operative at the same time that it is totally changeable.
It is possible that you are not interested in doing this search for each device and what you want is to know if there is some simple operation with which you can calculate these values. Indeed, yes it exists and it is a mathematical formula that will give result in Mflops.
To be able to use it we have to have two data for each device that we want to know. On the one hand, there would be the shaders and on the other we would need the data of its clock speed. The formula is very easy. We must multiply both quantities together 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 indicates the greatest reality is the Teraflop, we would have to divide the resulting amount by a thousand and so we would change the unit.
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