An up-to-date phone probably performs at around a
gigaflop, a measurement just one step down from Data's teraflops--and people carry that device in their pocket.
The use of these characters only enhanced the contrast between the state of the art cardboard cutout technology then, and the fifty million
Gigaflop (yes, that's a real term) needed for the photo-realist rendering of today's masterpiece Shrek.
These chips have also brought PCs to the level of
gigaflop (billion floating point ops/sec) performance.
One
Gigaflop equals one billion floating-point operations per second.
Key technology features incorporated in the system include a high dynamic range receiver, high performance analog-to-digital converters, high throughput (on the order of one
Gigaflop) high speed signal processing, extensive use of thin-layer and macrohybrid circuitry, a redundant architecture and a full BIT capability.
Many forward-looking thinkers would feel safer if the destiny of the earth were entrusted to a
gigaflop rather than to President Reagan, but traditionalists like former British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe are not among them.
For comparison, your desktop computer probably runs on the
gigaflop level, able to perform billions of calculations per second.
Argonne has acquired IBM's 16
gigaflop POWERparallel system--the most powerful parallel system ever installed to carry out research.
Twenty teams of researchers whose engineering application codes run on Cray supercomputers at speeds of at least 1 billion floating-point operations per seconds (
gigaflops) received Cray
Gigaflop Performance Awards late last year at the Supercomputing '89 conference in Reno, Nev.
The HPCG was also won by Tsinghua University with a score of 1,985.97
Gigaflops.
(3)
Gigaflops Billion floating point operations per second.