What is Floating-Point Performance?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
785 words · ~3 min read
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thanks for watching Techquickie click the subscribe button and enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos when it
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comes to processor speed whether it's a CPU or a GPU you probably think in
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megahertz or gigahertz at first but
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these numbers aren't actually very useful if you're comparing processors
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across different models so maybe that's
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why graphics card makers in particular have started leaning on a specification
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called flops to describe their latest and greatest hardware but what does that
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mean I mean is that a measure of how many disappointing $60 games your card
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will run before it dies no flops is a
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performance metric that stands for floating-point operations per second now
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this might sound like the time it takes for your magic 8-ball to give you an
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answer but it's really a measure of how quickly your processor can do math that
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involves a mix of large small and fractional numbers and it matters
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because computers only have a finite amount of space to store the numbers
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that they work with for a single number this is typically either 32 or 64 bits
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depending on what processor and program you're using so in order to express a
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range of very large and very small numbers some of these bits are allocated
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destroying the digits of the number itself while others are reserved to
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specify where the decimal point should be a little bit like scientific notation
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this makes it easy to express huge or
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tiny numbers in a limited number of bits
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but keep in mind that floating-point operations are less straightforward for
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your processor to carry out than ones that only involve integers due to the
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computer needing to deal with ever-changing exponents converting them
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to and from decimal numbers and rounding them off now if you watched our episode
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explaining the difference between CPUs and GPUs which if you haven't you can
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check out here you might already understand why it's more common to see a
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flops measurement on a graphics card spec page versus one for a CPU much of
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the math your GPU needs to do in order to render the images that you see on
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your screen uses vectors to determine where each line and shape should go and
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crunching these numbers involves using many different floating-point numbers
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whose exponent values can vary quite a bit now supercomputers and more powerful
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workstations used for scientific research and weather modeling are also
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often described in terms of flops as they also heavily rely on using
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floating-point numbers but what exactly
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does any of this mean for you out there yes you Tom Smith who's just trying to
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score a good deal on a video card should you go for whatever has the highest
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flops that you can still afford the answer is probably no even though more
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flops does indicate more raw computational power it means it's better
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in the same way that a CPU with more megahertz or a digital camera with more
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megapixels is better many other things
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will play a huge role in how good of an experience you'll have with your
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graphics card including memory capacity and bandwidth the specific architecture
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that your GPU uses and even how nicely the drivers play with the specific games
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in your library so the takeaway here is that unless you're an AI or Big Data
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researcher there's no need to be all starry-eyed at how the new Titan V has a
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hundred and ten teraflops of pure power
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but at least you know that the specification on the back of the box
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doesn't refer to the sound that your wallet makes as it
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flops down on the checkout counter
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