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From: Altered Beast <j63480576@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: rant
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 05:46:23 -0500
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Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:19:58 -0500, Altered Beast
> <j63480576@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Kyonshi wrote:
>>> On 8/4/2024 6:09 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
>>>> On 8/3/2024 10:38 PM, Mark P. Nelson wrote:
>>>>> Look, the whole point of the *personal* computer was that you didn't
>>>>> have to rent time from
>>>>> IBM to figure out your profit/loss balance.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ever since then, every computer company has been trying desperately
>>>>> to revive the "You
>>>>> only rent it" model to bolster their bottom line, no matter their
>>>>> public face on the question.
>>>>>
>>>>> We're getting closer and closer to no longer having personal
>>>>> computers which we own and
>>>>> can configure/control as we wish but rather Microsoft or Banana
>>>>> computers for which we pay
>>>>> a regular fee.
>>>>>
>>>>> Pfui!
>>>>
>>>> Its not just computers.
>>>>
>>>
>>> well, by now lots of things have more computing power than was used to
>>> get man to the moon. e.g. cars.
>>
>> What units are computing power measured in?
> 
> 
> Here's a layman's answer. I'm sure experts in the field will take
> issue with some of my descriptions but I think its a good enough
> overall introduction.
> 
> FLOPS and IPS are the units that I've typically seen used. The former
> - Floating Point Operations Per Second - calculates how fast the
> computer can do arithmetic calculations, which is a 'real-world'
> example of what PCs do. After all, in the end everything we ask our
> computers to do revolves around maths, so knowing how fast it can run
> a calculation is the best measurement between computers.
> 
> IPS - Instructions Per Second - counts how many internal instructions
> the CPU can parse each second. However, because of differences in
> CPUs, IPS doesn't directly scale to output; a calculation that takes
> one type of CPU three instructions may take a different architecture
> five instructions and a third architecture might need twelve.
> 
> 
> FLOPS is more useful for comparing actual performance between
> different computers (e.g., your phone versus your home PC versus an
> F-35 fighter jet). IPS is really only useful for comparing between
> similar architectures (e.g., an Intel 13900 and an Intel 13700). There
> are also different ways of measuring a CPUs performance, which causes
> different results depending on which method you used.
> 
> Precision (how many decimal points you use) also effects the results
> of FLOPs benchmarking; some computers only have 16-bit precision,
> others go up to 64-bit. Many early computers also lacked dedicated
> hardware for floating-point calculations, and so had to 'brute-force'
> the math at a significant hit to performance. Others were specialized
> for floating point performance at a cost to 'regular' arithmetic used
> for a lot of user operations. And -especially with older computers-
> architectural differences were so radically different that comparisons
> are almost impossible. 

I had heard of FLOPS via MATLAB, which reports the number of FLOP in 
each instruction.  I hadn't realized that the S in FLOPS was for 
seconds, which was why it didn't make sense to me.  I'm really surprised 
at the numbers especially for Cray.  2 FLOPS sounds kind of primitive. 
MATLAB had operations on the order of 1 teraflop for one instruction. 
Of course, these could take a few minutes to execute.