Teraflop measures the number of floating point operations a computer processor can perform per second. The US military designed a supercomputer capable of performing one quadrillion calculations per second, the only known computer capable of petaflop processing speeds. Improved flop counts and advances in processing power and technology affect the performance of personal computers. An average computer has a chip speed of about 10 flops, while a teraflop can finish a calculation before the operator realizes the equals key has been pressed.
A teraflop is a computer term used to define the number of floating point operations that a computer processor can perform per second. Used to measure computing performance, floating point operations per second or FLOPS determines how many floating point math operations a computer’s processor can handle. The world’s largest computers use chips that operate in Teraflops, trillions of operations per second. Teraflop computers are typically found in both educational and military research facilities.
While the number of FLOPS a computer can handle is only part of the equation in determining computer speed, and things like disk input/output (I/O) and memory usage can play an important role, improved flop counts and advances in processing power and technology certainly keep things interesting.
In May of 2008, the US military designed a super computer capable of performing one quadrillion calculations per second. It is as of this writing the only known computer capable of petaflop processing speeds.
With research conducted by military and educational institutions across the country, all types of computer chips can benefit from this research. For example, graphics chips have come a long way and process far more FLOPS than the typical CPU.
In terms of the power of a personal computer, the more calculations per second a system can handle, the more operations the user of that system can perform. There will be other limitations, the Operating system size and hardware usage will affect performance and the amount of applications being used at one time will affect performance, but advances in chip performance showcased in the super computers of today will definitely affect the desktop PCs being released in the future.
To give an idea of the operating speed of a teraflop microchip, an average computer, performing a single operation, has a chip speed of about 10 flops. This is fast enough for the human interacting with the calculator to see its operation as instantaneous. It’s almost as if a teraflop would have finished a calculation for 2.2 + 2.3 before the operator realizes the equals key has been pressed.
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