Talk:Floating point operations per second

Records Section

The records section has some significant errors in it. The section itself is completely speculative, as no actual BlueGene/P systems have been deployed yet. Currently, no computational system operates at sustained speeds in excess of a single petaflop. The IBM press release being used is not objective, and it should not be stated as a record until the speed is demonstrated publicly, or through an independent entity such as TOP500.

Really, the whole section needs to be cleaned up, as the SX-9 has not public benchmarks available either.

In fact, if one wants to speculate about the fastest computers, it would be perhaps more useful to include a discussion of the NSF Track 2 systems, as well as the proposed Track 1 system (which is specifically being designed to operate in excess of one petaflop, sustained) The currently operational track 2 system RANGER is operating at approximately half a petaflop, putting it around the current speeds of the BlueGene systems that have been deployed.

I have a comment on the records section, in regards to this paragraph:

"As of 2008, the fastest PC processors (quad-core) perform over 51 GFLOPS(QX9775)[13]. GPUs in PCs are considerably more powerful in pure FLOPS. For example, in the GeForce 8 Series the nVidia 8800 Ultra performs around 576 GFLOPS on 128 Processing elements. This equates to around 4.5 GFLOPS per element, compared with 2.75 per core for the Blue Gene/L. It should be noted that the 8800 series performs only single precision calculations, and that while GPUs are highly efficient at calculations they are not as flexible as a general purpose CPU."

If you want to show that graphics cards can perform considerably more flops, why not compare to the ATI Radeon 4870X2, which can do 2.4 teraflops? That's over four times faster than the 8800 ultra that's listed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.205.179.184 (talk) 20:33, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, lets update it every time a new GPU comes out, and then spark a fanboy riot whenever we pick ATI or Nvidia because nobody can conclusively decide which cards are faster anymore. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.185.55.105 (talk) 18:14, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Zettaflops

Zettaflops means 10²¹ FLOPS, a thousand petaflops

No it doesn't—it's a million petaflops. Anyway, zettaflops appears nowhere else in Wikipedia, so we may safely assume the statement irrelevant. —Herbee19:28,2004 May 22 (UTC)

Reference ?

It is interesting to note that the combined calculating power of all the computers on the planet is only several petaflops.

Interesting indeed. Does anyone have a reference? —Herbee 21:41, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

Why is that interesting? It's just a total, what did you expect? --Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It's interesting numbers to estimate real possibilities of distributed computing projects. But they are much bigger.

Average computer has a speed about 1 GFLOPS. There are about 1 billion computers in the world. So total speed of all computers is about 1000 PFLOPS, or 1 ExaFLOPs. It's 4000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer IBM Blue Gene/L (280 TFLOPs). --Alexey Petrov 19:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Question

Why do people write FLOPS and MIPS rather than flops and mips? I cannot think of a good reason for the capitals. And besides, people write mph (miles per hour) and dpi (dots per inch) rather than MPH and DPI. I rewrote the article with flops and it doesn't look bad, I think. Is there a reason why I shouldn't move this article to Flops? —Herbee 22:09, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

FLOPS is the correct abbreviation, flops is not a word. Non-technical people usually write FLOPS as flops usually out of ignorance of what the abbreviation actually means. --Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It is FLOPS in Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson and flop/s or Flop/s or FLOPS in Sourcebook of Parallel Computing by Dongarra et al. Personally I think it should be FLOPS, but there is no consistency in respected publications. By the way, it is MPH in my car. --Koobas 17:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Metric

As a mathematician, the use of the term 'metric' makes me uneasy. Isn't there a better, less jargon-y, alternative: 'measure' perhaps? mat_x 19:46, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

---

There is a new winner http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4379261.stm

Removal of Irrelevant and Ambiguous Material

I recently removed the following:

The computers that generated Lord of the Rings characters and places - Gollum, the Balrog, and Middle Earth - are now available for hire, for example. The cluster of 1,008 computers in New Zealand can be rented on-demand, on a per hour, per processor basis.

Already the supercomputer is being used to design a super yacht and test gene sequencing algorithms.

The first paragraph is not related to FLOPS and is somewhat abrupt in context.

The second paragraph is ambiguous to which supercomputer it is referring to, and probably irrelevent in any case.

--Zdude255 21:56, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I removed the following, compare MDGRAPE-3 and Blue-Gene/L:

"and, rather than costing billions of dollars, the machine only costs 7 million dollars to build."

This is quite a misleading figure, as the Japanese government got quite a bit of help from the corporations involved, none of which are included in that figure. The true cost of the MDGRAPE-3 machine is much, much higher, and unknown.

--ww.ellis 30 Aug 2006

NVIDIA vs. VIA

Removed from the article:

Nvidia work out performance by adding pixel shader and vertex shader performance together (in the PS3s case this is 1.8 TFLOPs). ATI work out performance by taking the average performance of the two shader types (quoted at 0.9 TFLOPs), and so if the ATI performance was taken by the same method as Nvidia then the performance would be the same. And so the total performance of the Xbox 360 would be around the 2 TFLOPs mark too. However as it stands Microsoft have released figures based on ATI's figures (1 TFLOPs).

This seems to be a marchitecture-based dicussion. Can we let this be fought out on the games console article talk pages, please? This article now, in any case, compares manufacturer-announced FLOPs in each case: marchitecture vs. marchitecture. More in the article. -- Karada 12:30, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

PS3 teraflops misquoted

I changed 2.18 to 2.0, the figure stated in their press release. I note that other sources do claim the number to be 2.18 but I thought it best to use the number from their press release.

http://www.us.playstation.com/Pressreleases.aspx?id=279

Irrelevance

I removed the following because they are, for the most part, irrelevant.

Furthermore, the system memory bandwidth on each console is a major factor to its performance. Even though some sources claim that
Xbox 360's overall system memory bandwidth eclipses PS3's by a factor of five, its actually untrue or, if you want, half-true. This
huge bandwith is only between the GPU and its 10MB of Embedded RAM which can not be compared to overall system bandwith. Moreover,
Xbox360 will have a shared memory architecture for CPU and GPU. Playstation 3 uses different memory pool for each, CPU and GPU,
which, along with faster XDR memory, means more than twice the bandwith of Xbox360. All in all, it can be said, that memory
architecure and bandwidth for both consoles is equally efficient. Only time will tell though.

Memory bandwidth may affect the amount of FLOPS achievable in practice, but the paragraph does not describe how.

Human mind in FLOPS?

Humans are even worse floating-point processors. If it takes a person a quarter of an hour to carry out a pencil-and-paper long division problem with 10 significant digits, that person would be calculating in the milliFLOPS range. Bear in mind, however, that a purely mathematical test may not truly measure a human's FLOPS, as a human is also processing smells, sounds, touch, sight and motor coordination. This takes an average human's FLOPS up to an estimated 10 quadrillion FLOPS (roughly 10 PFLOPS). [1]

Wasn't that in MIPS? As the article says:

We might take a rough estimate and say it is handling 10 quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is hard to say.

I belive we should assume that it's about 10 GMIPS, not 10 PFLOPS. --83.11.55.87 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Distributed computing

Quote from this article:
Distributed computing uses the Internet to link personal computers to achieve a similar effect: Folding@home, the most powerful distributed computing project, has been able to sustain over 200 TFLOPS. SETI@home computes data at more than 100 TFLOPS.

And from another article at Wikipedia (Supercomputer):
One such example, is the BOINC platform which is a host for a number of distributed computing projects recorded on March 25th 2006 processing power of over 418 TFLOPS spread over 930,000+ computers on the network [3]. Its largest single project the SETI@home project has a reported processing power of 238 TFLOPS on March 25th 2006 [4].

On May 16, 2005, the distributed computing project Folding@home reported a processing power of 195 TFLOPS on their CPU statistics page.

It seems, that second variant is right, because SETI@home is slightly bigger/faster project than Folder@home. So this article contains incorrect numbers. --Alexey Petrov 19:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree, but there is some controversy over it, I changed the article to be more netural towards both projects, since they are both the most seen and most powerful networks. Requen 08:22, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Computing in One Operation

"Pocket calculators are at the other end of the performance spectrum. Each calculation request to a typical calculator requires only a single operation..."

How is it possible to compute something in one operation? It first has to store the first operand that's typed in before even starting to compute. Or am I misunderstanding the meaning of the word "operation."83.118.38.37 19:28, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Gave it some second thought and I see wat is meant now.83.118.38.37 03:18, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

It's the difference between "operations" and "instructions"... the device may process a few hundreds of instructions per second, but only manage ten or twenty operations. Or in the case of an everyday mid-level scientific calculator (say a $20 Casio 85fx or the like), maybe a couple of KIPS but only 50 or so FLOPS... as seen when issuing an instruction like "!69" (it's an integer operation, but the calculator will treat all numbers as fixed-precision floats, so...) which involves 68 seperate multiplication operations, each involving a good number of seperate instructions, and needs more than a second to calculate (blanking the display whilst it works). Or much longer if power is low (they seem to work asynchronously and on the basis of how much current is available - not an issue if the user is just doing simple sums and it's more important to keep the LCD contrast high, but the scientific operations can become quite drawn-out). But it's no bad thing; it doesn't need to go any faster, and it makes the batteries last an awful long time. 193.63.174.10 (talk) 12:31, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Data

In the article it says that the character "data" in Star Trek was as fast as 60 trillion operations per second or "60 TIPS". My question is, what is this "TIPS" - word? Should it not be properly explained in the article? Also it would be cool if someone with knowledge about computers wrote something about how fast that would be in comparison to todays super computers. --Mailerdaemon 13:12, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

The Trek writers' policy is actually to prevent such comparisons, because they know their imagination will probably be hilariously off the mark at the supposed time of events happening, or even long before. "TIPS" could be "tera", or it could be some other unit entirely. Compared with "Quads" of storage - the T could be "Trios" or somesuch. A completely made-up measurement. Anyhow, regardless of the deliberate neutering of such attempts, coming up with comparisons between our real-world hardware (hard enough to benchmark at the best of times) and completely fictional and poorly defined stuff stated to be first used after our likely lifespans isn't really of any use. My 2100mhz, dual core, high cycle efficiency, high ram, hard disk equipped, dual hi-rez full colour monitor workstation is approximately 1000x better in all meaningful stats than my first "proper" (non-"toy") computer. For the majority of stuff I do with it, it's not really more than 3 or 4x better, and for some things, it's about the same or maybe worse. Power doesn't necessarily imbue utility. 193.63.174.10 (talk) 13:07, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Game Consoles

I'd like to see some sources regarding the performance of game consoles. Those ratings seem a little far fetched to me. Those ratings would put the 360 ahead of the top quad core processors and two 8800GTXs (fastest consumer GPU on the market as of right now) in SLI according to the figures given in the article. Since the PPC Xenon in the 360 has a theoretical maximum performance of 116 GFLOPS and the ATI Xenos is capable of 240, the actual power of the 360 is less than half of what's claimed in the article. I assume the results are similar with the PS3. --Mphilp 04:24, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree: I would actually state that those figures presented by Sony and Microsoft are outright lies, and roughly 10 times what they should be.

• For the Xbox 360:
  • The CPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 19.2 GFLOPS. (3 cores x 2 FP units per @3.2GHz)
  • The GPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 96 GFLOPS. (48 stream processors, each capable of handling a 4-wide FP vector calculation, @500MHz)
  • The total of the two is 115.2 GFLOPS.
• For the Playstation 3:
  • The CPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 92.8 GFLOPS. (7 SPEs with 4 FP units per, and one PPE with 1 FP unit per, all @3.2GHz)
  • The GPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 105.6 GFLOPs. (24 pixel shader units with 2 4-wide FP vector units per, @550MHz)
  • The total of the two is 198.4 GFLOPs.

I found it rather interesting that the figures I came up with are roughly 1/10th of what the consoles' respective makers claimed for them. Though I'll admit that I may have some data errors in my numbers... But I still think it brings up a valid point, that the gaming consoles, which are PRIMARILY based off of off-the-shelf PC components, technically CANNOT be as fast as the best PC hardware made at a later point than the console hardware itself. However, for the time being, the 'false' figures stand, given that those are the "official" claims of those companies. Nottheking (talk) 20:59, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Does anyone know if the cell processor performs FLOPs both on up and down cycles of the clock? That would explain the almost doubled values. Anonymous —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.16.237.2 (talk) 20:41, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Wrong, wrong.

• Xbox 360:
  • The Xenon has a theoretical maximum performance of 115.2 GFLOPS - 3 cores x 8 VMX128 units per core plus parallel 4 FP units @3.2GHZ.
  • The Xenos has a theoretical maximum performance of 240 GFLOPS. (48 unified shader units, each capable of handling vector-4 MADD operations plus a scaler special function @500MHz)
• Playstation 3:
  • The Cell Broadband Engine has a theoretical maximum performance of 204.8 GFLOPS. (7 SPEs with 8 FP and integer SIMD instruction and one PPE with 8 FP @3.2GHz)
  • The Reality Synthesizer has a theoretical maximum performance of 255.2 GFLOPs. (24 shader units, one vector-4 operation and 2 MADDS each plus 8 vertex units handling one vector-4 op plus a scaler parallel op @550MHz)

Both stand way below a single GTX 8800 (518.4 GFLOPS @ 1350MHz) and are far, far from a Radeon HD 4890 (1.36 TFLOPS @ 850MHz).

Equivalence to Hertz

Are the two terms FLOPS and Hertz interconvertable? If so, what is the ratio? Jack · talk · 20:46, Monday, 12 February 2007

No, they aren't. While one (hypothetical) processor may only do one FLOP/s, another processor with different architecture could do many (many) more. Dalef 07:08, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it's possible to use the clock speed of a processor to determine its theoretical maximum floating-point performance, which, indeed, would be measured in FLOPS. To get such a figure, simply multiple the number of floating-point calculations the device can perform per clock cycle, and multiply it by the clock rate. However, it would be just that: a theoretical figure. The ACTUAL floating-point performance (peak, average, etc.) would be impossible to accurately determine in this manner, since it relies on the entire computer system, not just the floating-point calculation hardware itself. Hence, the only reliable way to get THAT figure would be an actual benchmark, such as LINPACK. Nottheking (talk) 21:01, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Remember that different processors do differing amounts of FLOPS/s, so even while you can calculate it for one processor, that value does not hold for a processor based on a different micro-architecture. The matter also get more complicated with multi-core processors. For the same clock speed, you can (ideally, not real world) do twice as many calculations.

So there is no way to convert between FLOPS and Hz that holds for all architectures. Dalef (talk) 04:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Etymology

Does anybody know who "named" the acronym? -scottc229

Human FLOPS

The article stats the following: "a purely mathematical test will not truly measure a human's FLOPS, as a human is also processing thoughts, consciousness, smells, sounds, touch, sight and motor coordination." Since the definition of a FLOP is floating point operation per second, I fail to see how thought processing, consciousness, smells, sounds, touch etc. have anything to do with FLOPS. Unless someone can give me a reason for not doing so, I will delete this phrase after a couple days. Epachamo 00:36, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

I believe the idea is that if the human mind quit doing everything else and devoted all its capacity to calculating, then it would be faster, or rather do more per second. However, we cannot turn our senses off nor can we stop doing any of the other things our brain does in the background...hence, measureing the minds FLOPS, while giveing a number, has a result that fails to correspond to the actual power of the mind. (Consider: This measurement is clearly an indicator of performance speed...as it fails to correspond to such in the human case, this measure is misleading)--71.61.48.109 02:51, 23 April 2007 (UTC)Phoenix1177

The fact that we have many background processes and cannot turn off these background processes is one reason WHY we cannot do many FLOPS, but does not change the fact that we CAN'T do many FLOPS. If FLOPS are your measuring stick, then we stink. However, we rock computers at image processing still ;) (and swimming)Epachamo 01:42, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

flops

• single-purpose hardware can never be included in an honest FLOPS figure.

if you include MDGRAPE-3 then other single-purpose hardware must be included also; also debatable if the new GPUs are really single-purpose, as they can perform graphics rendering and Folding. Also, please sign your comments in future, this is Wikipedia policy.Jaganath 09:28, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Records

Does anyone else think the records section should be in order of flops? Craig Mayhew 16:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Precision?

Shouldn't the article differencieate between double precious and single precision floating point operations? A processor designed specifically to perform single precision operations may not perform so well with operations with double precision and vice versa. Adding a section explaining the difference between the two may also clear up some common misconceptions, such as only the FLOPS count being important. Rilak (talk) 07:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

What kind of floating point operations are we talking about ?

What type of floating point operation is actually meant by the acronym FLOPS? For example, isn't non-binary multiplication simply a series of addition operations, and therefore more expensive than addition alone? (At least in integer arithmetic, I assume floating point arithmetic is similar.)--Bradley Mitchell (talk) 20:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

According to this article, flops measurement seems to be based mainly on the LINPACK benchmark, which uses a Gaussian elimination. According to the Gaussian elimination article, there are 1/3 n^3 multiplications, 1/3 n^3 subtractions, and only 1/2 n^2 division. So I understand that 2 flops would include one multiplication, one subtraction and all loading and storing necessary.

If everyone agrees with my definition, and we find a clear source about that, it would be nice to include it the article, as it is currently far from clear as for what a flop actually is.--Yitscar (talk) 14:11, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

What is floating point operation?

The reference I included below is a good starting point to understand the difference between floating point operation and integer (fixed-point) operation. Floating point vs fixed-point.Ryoohkies 11:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Integer. These designations refer to the format used to store and manipulate numeric representations of data. Fixed-point are designed to represent and manipulate integers – positive and negative whole numbers – for example 16 bits, yielding up to 65,536 possible bit patterns (2¹⁶). Integer Ryoohkies 11:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Floating-point (Real Numbers). The encoding scheme for floating point numbers is more complicated than for fixed point. The basic idea is the same as used in scientific notation, where a mantissa is multiplied by ten raised to some exponent. For instance, 5.4321 × 10⁶, where 5.4321 is the mantissa and 6 is the exponent. Scientific notation is exceptional at representing very large and very small numbers. For example: 1.2 × 10⁵⁰, the number of atoms in the earth, or 2.6 × 10^-23, the distance a turtle crawls in one second, compared to the diameter of our galaxy. Notice that numbers represented in scientific notation are normalized so that there is only a single nonzero digit left of the decimal point. This is achieved by adjusting the exponent as needed. Floating point representation is similar to scientific notation, except everything is carried out in base two, rather than base ten. While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985. This standard defines the format for 32 bit numbers called single precision, as well as 64 bit numbers called double precision. Floating point can support a much wider range of values than fixed point, with the ability to represent very small numbers and very large numbers.

With fixed-point notation, the gaps between adjacent numbers always equal a value of one, whereas in floating-point notation, gaps between adjacent numbers are not uniformly spaced – the gap between any two numbers is approximately ten million times smaller than the value of the numbers (ANSI/IEEE Std. 754 standard format), with large gaps between large numbers and small gaps between small numbers. Floating Point Ryoohkies 11:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Dynamic Range and Precision. The exponentiation inherent in floating-point computation assures a much larger dynamic range – the largest and smallest numbers that can be represented - which is especially important when processing extremely large data sets or data sets where the range may be unpredictable. As such, floating-point processors are ideally suited for computationally intensive applications. It is also important to consider fixed and floating-point formats in the context of precision – the size of the gaps between numbers. Every time a processor generates a new number via a mathematical calculation, that number must be rounded to the nearest value that can be stored via the format in use. Rounding and/or truncating numbers during processing naturally yields quantization error or ‘noise’ - the deviation between actual values and quantized values. Since the gaps between adjacent numbers can be much larger with fixed-point processing when compared to floating-point processing, round-off error can be much more pronounced. As such, floating-point processing yields much greater precision than fixed-point processing, distinguishing floating-point processors as the ideal CPU when computational accuracy is a critical requirement. Fixed point (integer) vs Floating point Ryoohkies 11:02, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Cost of computing

In the cost of computing section, the calculation assumes continuous 135 watt consumption for the PS3 console. Even when in operation and under load, it is unlikely that the console continuously consumes 135 watts, so the claim that it would consume $118 worth of electricity at average US electricity prices is misleading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.145.105.18 (talk) 16:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Quote: "Approximate cost per GFLOPS 1961: US$1,100,000,000,000,000, ($1.1 trillion), or US$1,100 per FLOPS". If 1 GFLOPS = 1,000,000,000 (10⁹) FLOPS, and 1 FLOPS costs US$1,100, then 1 GFLOPS costs US$1,100,000,000,000 (US$1,100 * 10⁹ = US$1.1 * 10¹²) and not US$1,100,000,000,000,000 (US$1.1 * 10¹⁵) as in the quote.--87.182.37.35 (talk) 11:02, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Silly units

It is a bit silly that the side panel goes up to the unit of xeraflop, given that 1 xeraflop is about a billion times more that the sum of the entire computing power on Earth. It is not particularly useful to include units which have not yet found a use. Even statements about hypothetical computing power in the future are much clear when expressed in terms of units that are actually used now. For example "The supercomputers of 2020 may be a thousand petaflops" gets the message across better than "The supercomputers of 2020 may be one exaflop", since the exaflop unit has no real reason to be used yet. Elroch (talk) 11:51, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

This argument would apply to Yottaflop and the measurements are simply there to show the path of growth -- even if we won't exist to enjoy it. Lordvolton (talk) 15:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Never mind that we've already easily managed such a magnitude increase of computing capacity once over the past century? These units will be in use at some point, possibly sooner than might be easily imagined, so why not use them? Furthermore they're simply part of the normal SI range of exponential prefixes, it's not like some bored computer engineer has dreamt them up off his own back. Same as going in the other direction down to micro, nano, pico, femtoFLOPs (etc) if for some reason an exceptionally slow computing device (but maybe one that did an awful lot with that one operation!) was to be built or discovered... 193.63.174.10 (talk) 13:16, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Xera is a fake prefix

"Xera" is not currently an SI prefix. See, for example, the official NIST page on prefixes.

I'm therefore going to remove it. If anyone objects, we can bring it back, but I'll have to ask for an official source claiming "Xera" is an SI prefix.--Pmetzger (talk) 16:23, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

There are quite a few examples of it being used, here are a couple. You should google “xeraflop” if you want more references.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/8159-military-supercomputer-reaches-new-milestone/

http://www.ancientrails.com/?p=689

Lordvolton (talk) 19:13, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry but no, those are not valid references. You'll notice both of those links are from "articles" written on the 9th of June - ie. yesterday, both of them about the Roadrunner computer and quoting the same peice fo text. If you google "xeraflop" all the results are also from the same peice of text copied verbatim on about a thousand or more different "news" sites and blogs. And where do you think the original author of that peice got his FLOPS prefix information? I'll bet 1000 simoleans it came from this very wikipedia article. This appears to be a classic case of unverified information making it onto Wikipedia, a bad journalist using Wikipedia as their sole source of information, and the resulting article subsequently being used as a reference for maintaining the incorrect information on Wikipedia. It's a circular reference. If you have any good references then I'd like to see them, but those you've provided don't mean anything. Frankly though I think we both know this is a non-starter: The FLOPS prefixes are based on SI unit prefixes and there simply isn't an SI prefix called "xera" -- ExNihilo (talk) 21:50, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Are they the modern day equivalent of the council of Nicaea? Everyone else is calling it xeraflop and you offer no alternative. What is your brotherhood at the council of SI calling it? If what you're saying is true then there should be an alternative reference to their preferred name. Of course, you don't provide those citations or references because they don't exist. Absent any evidence supporting your claim to an alternate name it will remain xeraflop. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lordvolton (talk • contribs) 22:45, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

What the hell are you talking about? There's no need for an alternative, there simply is no recognised name for 10^27, just as there is no recognised name for 10^30, 10^33, or 10^30000 - there are an infinite number of powers of ten, do you think there are an infinite number of words to describe them? Do you even know what SI is? And of course there's no reference for a non-existent prefix. As always the burden of proof (or rather, burden of reference) lies on the person adding something. And it's becoming quite clear you have no reference because none exists. -- ExNihilo (talk) 22:53, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

If "xera" is not an official SI prefix, then it should not be mentioned. Anyone can make up their own units, and the press is particular well known for doing so to make their stories more sensational, thus invalidating the provided references. Adding "xera" is as ridiculous as adding whatever unit of week The Register is using - the last time I checked it was a "half a rat brain" or something similair being equal to roughly 0.35 teraFLOPs. Rilak (talk) 07:18, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

IBM Roadrunner

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7443557.stm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.247.28.157 (talk) 18:19, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Excellent citation paper

[2] -- has all sorts of information comparing the first list to the 30th and lists all sorts of records that were broken Altonbr (talk) 15:34, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

When will we reach a xeraflop?

Assuming Moore's law holds and computational power doubles every 18 months in the year 2068 we will break the xeraflop barrier.

Note: to put it into perspective I've listed the equivalent number of petaflops. A xeraflop is over a trillion petaflops!

2008 – 1 petaflop

2011 – 4 petaflops

2014 – 16 petaflops

2017 – 64 petaflops

2020 – 256 petaflops

2023 – 1,024 petafops (1 exaflop)

2026 – 4,096 petaflops

2029 – 16,384 petaflops

2032 – 65,536 petaflops

2035 – 262,144 petaflops

2038 – 1,048,576 petaflops (1 zettaflop)

2041 - 4, 194,304 petaflops

2044 – 16,777,216 petaflops

2047 – 67,108, 864 petaflops

2050 – 268, 435,456 petaflops

2053 – 1,073,741,824 petaflops (1 yottaflop)

2056 – 4,294,967,296 petaflops

2059 – 17,179,869,184 petaflops

2062 – 68,719,476,736 petaflops

2065 – 274,877,906,944 petaflops

2068 – 1,099,511,627,776 petaflops (1 xeraflop)

Lordvolton (talk) 00:33, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure where you're going with this. Are you suggesting that this be added to the article? If so then, as we've already established, there's no such thing as a xeraflop. Secondly there's no reason to believe that Moore's Law will hold for another 60 years so it's pretty pointless to show an obvious mathematical progression based on that assumption. -- ExNihilo (talk) 01:47, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Ray Kurzweil would ground you for two weeks if he read this blasphemy. He'd say, "Young Jedi, it's time I taught you about accelerating returns." Of course, the accelerating returns camp would complain that I am being too conservative. But like you they would complain.

Fear not, we'll get to a xeraflop sooner or later. The good news is that you'll be ungrounded way before then. =-)

Lordvolton (talk) 05:14, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

We will never reach a xeraflop, because there is no such thing as a xeraflop. There is no official SI prefix for 10^27, and if there ever is one it is unlikely it will be "xera". Pmetzger (talk) 22:29, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Another wikipedian beat you to the punch. http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Talk:SI_prefix

It looks like xeraflop has become the default reference, but the point is to show how quickly we'll reach seemingly mind boggling speeds. A xeraflop will be here in only 60 years based on Moore's Law. Lordvolton (talk) 00:01, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Default reference? If I am not mistaken, the editor describes "xeraflop" at the talk page you mentioned as "pseudostandard". In my view, that is very different from an approved international standard set by international standards authorities. Rilak (talk) 05:54, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

It's become nothing of the sort. The article he mentions is the exact same article we talked about in the above discussion. It was used in a single "article" which obviously sourced this Wikipedia page when XeraFLOP was incorrectly listed as an SI prefix. That is all. There's no "default reference" (whatever that means), no de facto prefix, no de jure prefix, nothing. As best as I can tell you are the one who first added XeraFLOP to the Wikipedia article in the first place so I suspect you know all this already. -- ExNihilo (talk) 11:52, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

You remind me of those English teachers who hated slang references. I actually googled "xeraflop" and "yottaflop". There are more references for xeraflop than yottaflop, which you believe is part of the Queen's English. If it's the common usage you'll have fun telling everyone to stop using the word "ain't" instead of "isn't". Well, except you have no replacement term, so we're left with xeraflop and lots of hand wringing. Even so, in 60 short years we'll have xeraflop supercomputers.

I wonder what we'll do with them? Lordvolton (talk) 22:56, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

I honestly don't know if you're trolling or you really just don't understand how stupid this is. As we've been through at least twice now: there is only one actual reference to XeraFLOPS - all of the sites on which that word occurs are quoting directly from that single "article", so saying that there are x amount of references when they're all the same is simply rubbish, and more to the point it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with slang or "the Queen's English", it's to do with SI prefixes, which are what's used in conjunction with FLOPS and just about any other computer-related measurement. There's no need for a replacement term because there's no need for a word for it at all. If computers (or anything else) ever reach such a scale that a 10^27 of some unit is a practical magnitude of measurement then I'm sure SI will come up with one. There's simply no need to make things up. -- ExNihilo (talk) 00:11, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

It is common to mix up "there" with "their". Therefore, "their" will now have of definition of "there", and "there" will now have the definition of "their". Now this would be silly, wouldn't it? Just because it is common does not make it right. Anyways, we can always worry about what to call 10^27 when it actually happens and that will be in 60 years, IF Moore's law does not implode and suck the universe into a vortex before 2068. Rilak (talk) 06:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Incorrect $/GFLOP for IBM Roadrunner?

Under "Cost of Computing" it is stated that IBM Roadrunner costs $0.13 per GFLOPS. The cost is actually closer to $130 per GFLOPS, if I am not mistaken.

Cost to build Roadrunner: $133 million USD

Roadrunner performance: 1.026 petaFLOPS (1026000 GFLOPS)

$133,000,000 / 1026000 = $129.6296 per GFLOPS

Perhaps I am wrong, someone please double check the math. Remain nameless (talk) 14:19, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Your math is right. The Roadrunner entry should be either clarified or removed. Remain nameless (talk) 03:07, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

'Cost of Computing' section is confusing

This section of the article has me confused. I don't know whether the prices represent the cost of individual components, specific machines or anything else for that matter. Could someone please clear this up by explaining what the prices are linked to. I have also marked it as confusing on the article. Supersword (talk) 23:20, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I've reworked that section a bit; I think I consider it to be clear enough now, so I'm (tentatively) removing the tag. - Reinderien^{talk/contribs} 21:39, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

PC Speed

"As of 2008, the fastest PC processors (quad-core) perform over 70 GFLOPS" I have credibility issues with this. Given a speed of 3.2GHz with 4 cores and completing one operation per cycle this gives 12.8 GFLOPS. Even assuming perfect hyperthreading that doubles the effective number of cores this is still a factor of 3 short. The reference given in the quote goes to a website that shows a graph of CPU speed giving 70 GFlops for a top spec processor but is this believable? Mtpaley (talk) 23:03, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

You have to calculate the peak performance of an Intel Core2/i7 like that: SSE2 => 2 doubles in each vector; 2 different ports and 2 different execution units with a throughput of one µop for floating point addition and multiplication => one packed double addition and multiplication in one clock cycle. Hyperthreading shares the execution units and other resources, resulting not in a higher FLOPS count. So you get 4 DP FLOP per core and clock cycle. This results in FLOPS = frequency*(# of cores)*4 = 79.9 GFLOPS for a six core i7-980X. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.67.216.116 (talk) 19:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

So if "frequency*(# of cores)*4 = 79.9 GFLOPS for a six core i7-980X" is true how come that the article claims its 107.55 GFLOP/s? Also the 980X==980XE

Aw, not this again...

That blasted Xera- prefix showed up again. I nuked it. <soapbox> Ever since the Tera- prefix the standards people at SI have based the new prefix on Greek or Latin (mostly Greek) terms relating to the number of 000s. The next one not yet defined is 9 sets of 000s. So if Greek is used again for nine, εννέα or ennéa, we might have enyaFLOPS, which is cool if you like her music. Or if Latin, it's either nove or nona. I say go with Latin, combine the two forms, and we get NovaFLOPS, which sounds pimp. Either way, it's moot, because SI has not established a 10²⁷ prefix yet. At all. My personal best guess is that someone's signature on the Starcraft forums (I'm not making this part up) who even acknowledged that it's a bogus word, got propagated into some crease of the public consciousness and found it's way here. It's still wrong. I've seen people talking on here mention that a Google of "xeraflops" gets lots of hits, but a search of "xera" with "prefix" gets only a few thousand and most on the first page do not have any relation to numbers or SI. </soapbox> Still doesn't exist. Thank you. -:-  AlpinWolf   -:- 06:11, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

List of current processors

There should be a list of current processors (Intel Core i7, Athlon 64, Cell, etc.) and their computing power in this article, shouldn't it? --bender235 (talk) 15:53, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Article describes what a floating point number is, but does is say what an op is?

For example, does a FLOP involve one or two floating point numbers? Assuming two, is it the addition of two FP numbers? Is it a multiplication? Division? Subtraction? If this was answered, I apologize, that I didn't see it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by BobEnyart (talk • contribs) 16:38, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I've tried to answer it higher in the page, but I didn't know where to add the information on the main page, plus it looked like original research to meYitscar (talk) 14:02, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

It's probably not clarified because it strongly depends on the context. In digital signal processing a flop often refers to a multiplication plus an addition because it's a common operation in filtering. Note that often some special architectures are used here using dedicated chips for the cpu consuming operations (like wired multiplications) introducing different FLOPS "levels" on a same board. In classrooms additions and substractions are often ignored and only multiplications and/or divisions are counted. Is there an official definition of "FLoating point OPeration"?(MaenINoldo (talk) 08:33, 12 October 2010 (UTC))

Double precision (dp) FLOPS of Radeon HD 5970

The Radeon HD 5970 has got 2*320 dp-capable ALUs running at 725 MHz. Each of them can calculate one dp FMA (fused multiply add) per cycle. So the computing power is 2*320*725*2 MFLOPS = 928 GFLOPS and not 1.09 TFLOPS (citation of reference no. 38). (87.180.223.105 (talk) 19:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC))

New record

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101028/tc_afp/chinatechnologyitworld Accordion to this news story a new computer in china is taking that #1 spot. Good idea to keep an eye out for updates worth mentioning in the article.Donhoraldo (talk) 13:10, 28 October 2010 (UTC)