ABSTRACT
C omputing performance-typically measured in millions of instructionsper second (MIPS) or floating-point operations per second (FLOPS)—has been improving at a staggeringly rapid and consistent rate over the past four decades. In the late 1970s, the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor could muster only about 50 kFLOPS (5 104 FLOPS), while at roughly the same time a Cray-1 supercomputer the size of a large refrigerator could opeate at a rate of roughly 160 MFLOPS (1.6 108 FLOPS). Today, the CPU in game consoles like the Playstation 4 or the Xbox One produces roughly 100 GFLOPS (1011 FLOPS) of processing power, and the fastest supercomputer, currently China’s Sunway TaihuLight, has a LINPACK benchmark score of 93 PFLOPS (peta-FLOPS, or a staggering 9.3 1016 floating-point operations per second). This is an improvement of seven orders of magnitude for personal computers, and eight orders of magnitude for supercomputers.
