FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second and I have some idea what Floating-point is. I want to know what these Operations are? Does +, -, *, / are the only operations or operations like taking logarithm(), exponential() are also FLOs?
Does + and * of two floats take same time? And if they take different time, then what interpretation should I draw from the statement: Performance is 100 FLOPS. How many + and * are there in one second.
I am not a computer science guy, so kindly try to be less technical. Also let me know if I have understood it completely wrong.
Thanks
There is no specific set of operations that are included in FLOPS, it's just measured using the operations that each processor supports as a single instruction. The basic arithmetic operations are generally supported, but operations like logarithms are calculated using a series of simpler operations.
For modern computers all the supported floating point operations generally run in a single clock cycle or less. Even if the complexity differs a bit between operations, it's rather getting the data in and out of the processor that is the bottle neck.
The reason that FLOPS is still a useful measure for computing speed is that CPUs are not specialized on floating point calculations. Adding more floating point units in the CPU would drive up the FLOPS, but there is no big market for CPUs that are only good at that.