FLoating point Operations Per Second – FLOPS, one of the more obscure acronyms in our lives, and one of the oldest ones. It’s since been modified with a prefix of M (mega), G (giga) and most recently T (tera). A Terra is a million millions, one trillion (1012) a whole lot of anything, whether its cycles (Hertz), Bytes, dollars, or FLOPS. (And note - the ‘S’ in FLOPS is capitalized.)

So I was asked recently, how many TFLOPS in all the game consoles?

There are two answers to that question.

Do you mean in all the ones built, or just the FLOPS of the specific consoles?

So what is the TFLOPS rating of the game consoles? Well there are two answers to that question too.

If you count central processor FLOPS that’s one answer, if you count the FLOPS potential of the GPU and add it to the CPU’s FLOPS that’s another answer. And that answer provokes all kinds of debate. One side (the one I favor) is that the FLOPS of the GPU aren’t used in computations and therefore shouldn’t be counted because they can’t be measured and just represent a theoretical number. The other side argues that they are indeed being used in computation - the computation of shader operations. However, both sides agree that there isn’t yet a benchmark that can measure them. And therefore I conclude that we shouldn’t use them in evaluating the CPU FLOPS of game consoles.

The other main answer to the original question is do you mean in all the ones built, so I added in the installed base of all the consoles shipped.

The following table lists the FLOPS in consoles.



2007, October: Sony PS3 console, at US$400, that runs at a claimed 2 teraFLOPS; these figures represent the processing power of the GPU. The seven CPUs run collectively at a lower 218 GFLOPS.[14]

All of the GLOPS of all the consoles to date are only 402; where as a modern GPU is over two times that – Moore’s law in action.

You can read this several ways:

All of the CPU consoles added up don’t equal 1 TFLOPS.
All of the consoles added up don’t exceed 2 TFLOPS even if you count GPU and CPU.
All consoles shipped to date add up to 7.318 EFLOPS - Exa FLOPS - 1018 and that’s a number that that thrills the folks at Folding@home.
Now why did I go through this laborious, pedantic, and sure to be arguable discussion? For several reasons:

It’s raining here on Mt Tiburon so I can’t go out and play.
I thought it was really interesting to look at how far consoles have progressed
I thought it was even more interesting to look at how far PC graphics have progressed – ATI and Nvidia are shipping TFLOPS AIBs, and the next gen coming out in June, with Dual GPUs will be approaching 5 TFLOPS per AIB.


Just think of what the game developers and the movie studios can do with kind of horsepower.

Think of the shader operations that will be offered soon. Those of you reading this who know me know Peddie’s first law – in computer graphics too much is not enough. And although I haven’t made it a law yet, if I did (it would be number three), I’m fond of saying – don’t just watch a movie – be in the movie.

That’s where we’re heading with all these tera and peta FLOPS and I can’t wait to get there because next stop after this one is the holodeck.

Posted by Jon Peddie on 05/24 at 12:02 PM

http://jonpeddie.com/jpr/blogs/how_many_flops/

[ 本帖最后由 Peee2 于 2008-6-25 14:51 编辑 ]

做个沙发，虽然是好老的东西了
图还是ps3ol的，这说明什么

不要乱转SB贴。

所以我很钦佩SONY，PS3如此强大的浮点运算，不去做Folding@home那些通用运算的确也太浪费了～～

可惜浮点运算和3D性能不能划等号，否则PS3就牛B了～

我没事在家都还玩玩Folding@home，为人类的进步做点小贡献！

嗯，最后说一下：LZ火星了！

看图,发现ps3比xo强很多,
恩,lz很开心,很欣慰

支持PS3搞Folding@home，虽然还不如800块显卡强.....

据说超市七度空间大促销  :D

roadrunner
1.026petaflops
都洗洗睡吧