: FLOPs, GIGAFLOPS, TERAFLOPS unit.

Question

I understand gigahertz, gigabytes, but not gigaflops.

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Thanks

In: 5

Answer 1

A “flop” is short for “floating point operation”. Floating point numbers are a type of number representation in computers, similar to scientific exponential notation (such as 3600 = 3.6e3).

FLOPS (or FLOP/s) tells you how many operations on floating point numbers a computer can do per second. A gigaflop is 1 billion flops, a teraflop is 1 trillion. The prefixes work the same for every unit.