Teraflop

What Does Teraflop Mean?

A teraflop is a rate of computing speed that achieves one trillion floating point operations per second. "Flops" refer to "floating point operations per second." The floating point method is similar to scientific notation and uses an exponent to scale real numbers and support a wider range of values than the alternative fixed-point method.

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Techopedia Explains Teraflop

In practical use, a teraflop valuation would be generated by calculations that take the peak processing power of a single processor and the clock speed of each processor to estimate total peak computing power for a device. While the gigaflop remains the standard in measuring computing power, tech experts have begun talking about a teraflop in new technologies currently in development, including Intel’s Knight’s Corner machine – planned for 2013. Currently, the teraflop is not achievable with today’s consumer devices, and experts refer to teraflop-able devices, which use multi-core technology to generate these extremely high processing speeds, as "breaking the barrier" of the race toward much faster devices.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…