Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) is a microprocessor performance unit used to quantify the number of floating-point operations a core, machine, or system is capable of in a one second.

Overview

FLOPS are a measure of performance used for comparing the peak theoretical performance of a core, microprocessor, or system using floating point operations. This unit is often used in the field of high-performance computing (e.g., supercomputers) in order to evaluate the peak theoretical performance of various scientific workloads. Traditionally, the FLOPS of a microprocessor could be calculated using the following equation:

With the advent of multi-socket and multi-core architectures, additional levels of explicit parallelism have been introduced resulting in the following modified equation:

and,

Modern microprocessors exploit data parallelism further through the introduction of various vector extensions such as x86's AVX and ARM's SVE. With those extensions, it's possible to performance multiple floating-point operations within a single instruction. For example, a typical fused multiply-accumulate (FMAC) operation can perform two floating-point operations at once. For a single core, this can be expressed as

And for a full system, this can be extended to: