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Penny Arcade - Comic - A New Metric
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - A New Metric
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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They are exactly what Jerry describes in the news post. A measure of how many floating point operations a cpu or GPU can perform in a second. It follows the standard SI prefix system so tera- is trillion or 10^12.
PSN:Furlion
Play it on PC. There's probably a mod that gives Geralt (and others) a giant mutant dong.
And if using Lucascraft's proposed metric of a 1000 dongs/sec, that would mean a 100 million floating points (i.e. 0.1 gigaflops) per dong per seconds, assuming the dong is 10x the rendering volume and no loss in resolutions. This last bit is important because those modders are pretty good. So it's safe to assume that the texture pack probably even improves on this aspect, which may end up requiring more floating points to achieve the same numerical precision... But that shouldn't distract your attention one bit on just handling getting down with that game, instead of waiting.
FLOP = floating point operations per second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_arithmetic
Many high-end CPUs and GPUs these days are well into the teraflop range. In other words, they're as powerful as (but not as high-throughput as) a supercomputer cluster from the late 90s.
Huh. Weird thing is, I actually knew about the concept, just not what it's called in English. "Teraflop" sounded like a joke about man's eternal thirst for specs.
Now, this specifically was of the form ______flops.
I really feel like it was in an old linux startup. Doesn't mean it's true, though...
AAAAHHH, I just figured it out! It was BogoMips!
BogoMips (from "bogus" and MIPS) is a crude measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel when it boots to calibrate an internal busy-loop.[1] An often-quoted definition of the term is "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing".
[...]
Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain kind of busy loop runs on a computer. "Bogo" comes from "bogus", i.e, something which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but BogoMips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips
Few sweeter feelings than when that info nugget finally works its way loose in your brain. Amazing how often you can "know that you know" something, while at he same time being totally unable to recall the something.
I'm sad it didn't turn out to be fauxps (pronounced foe-ps).
To be fair we had to beat on the abbreviation for a while to get flops out of FLoating point Operations Per Second. Somebody really wanted a cute little word to for in with bits and bytes and nibbles and bops.
I don't know, I think it would be pretty cute to measure how many fops your CPU could produce.
I haven't even seen either term used in a post-1990 book except for the old COBOL textbook nobody will steal from the free box at my annual garage sale.
Maybe glue a dollar bill to the front?
It's kind of useful because it's big and colorful and draws attention to the pile of old screwdrivers and USB cables that people actually take by the handful.
Glue all the cables to it. Sure it's a loss leader, but you wouldn't believe the attach rate.
This reminds me of Bogons, a particle emitted by people in suits that cause computers to stop working.
Or at least that's what I thought, but now it's a networking term for bogus packets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogon_filtering