• gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 days ago

    I know Terraflops are real and what they measure

    I still refuse to believe they’re not a fake term used to fluff up tech announcements and make shit sound more powerful than it is because that’s a fucking stupid name that nobody should use

    • tekato@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      That’s like saying clock rate and core count are fake terms. Sure, by themselves they might not mean much, but they’re part of a system that directly benefits from them being high.

      The issue with teraflops metric is that it is inversely proportional (almost linearly) to the bit-length of the data, meaning that teraflops@8-bit is about 2x(teraflops@16-bit). So giving teraflops without specifying the bit-length it comes from is almost useless. Although you could make the argument that 8-bit is too low for modern games and 64-bit is too high of a performance trade off for accuracy gain, so you can assume the teraflops from a gaming company are based on 16-bit/32-bit performance.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      ‘They are’

      It’s usually measured as the performance doing a floating point fused multiply-add (fma) - that’s it.

      But also, multiply then add is the cornerstone of 3D graphics…