# Solved: gigaflops Vs gigahertz



## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

right this is just a gernaral interst question. i know that a flop is a Floating point operation and i know that 1 gigaflop is 1000 million Floating point operation per second.
my question here is really in two main parts.

1. what it the relation between hertz and flops?

2. how would i go about finding out how many flops my computer is running at?

p.s. for any mods/admin looking at this i am sorry if this is in the wrong place as i am truly unsure as to where it best fits. so feel free to move it as you see fit.

thanks in advance


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## valis (Sep 24, 2004)

I've no clue, but there's gotta be a great pun in there somewhere......


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

I would have thought that the Intel (pun?) site amd the AMD site would have that for the detail chip specs? (put the specs on and look there)


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## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

well i thought so too but i did check the amd site and could not find anything that would give me a value


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Best I could find. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...e-SiSoftware-Sandra-2010-Pro-GFLOPS,2409.html 
Bit of a flop really....


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

There is no direct relationship. They can't be converted one to another, if that is what you mean.

Because processor speed is such a poor measure of system speed, manufacturers a while back tried to introduce new values for judging machine speed. FLOPS was one of them. It is a much better measure of data throughput on a machine than processor speed and makes comparisons between machines, regardless of their processors, easier.

But the general public, being what it is, balked at this attempt and still showed primary interest in the measure that tells a potential buyer much less: processor speed. Since "the customer is always right", we have gone back to processor speed.

Though FLOPS is not considered by all experts to be the very best measure, it is universally agreed to be better then processor speed. MIPS (Millions of instructions per second) is another common measure.

As much as I like this sysinfo utility, I haven't seen where it says anything about FLOPS. But I plan to run it right now since another forum recommended it for measuring FLOPS. Probably in the benchmarking section. It installs a driver (temporarily) that gives it low-level access to hardware and does its own hardware identification, so it can sometimes identify hardware labelled "unknown" by the OS.

PCWizard


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Flops have always been a measure of computer performance, just not the one commonly used
Back in the early days of computing (80286 days) the floating point operations were done by a separate co-processor (80287) which was optional, and quite expensive. People only tended to have one if they were doing a lot of heavy scientific and design work. Gradually the co-processor was integrated with the main CPU on the same die, although the data paths and processing paths to date are still mostly separate from the integer processing.
MHz is a measure of the clock speed of the whole CPU and is not actually a measure of the amount of work it can do.

Some CPU designs have more FPU paths than others and therefore are better at doing calculations where others concentrate on Integer Operations. It used to be that AMD were better at floating point than Intel, but I think that distinction has just changed. Also GPUs are now being used to do a lot of floating point work.

If you want a computer that is going to be used mainly for data handling with less graphics or scientific processing then FLOPS is not a measure to worry about.
The overall power of a CPU is a combination of FP and Integer processing with a hefty chunk of moving data thrown in.


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## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

cheers elvandil, that pcwizard looks useful
haven't found anything about flops on it though


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Aida64 has been released. You can try the beta version for a while. That has several FPU benchmarks and comparisons.


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## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

cool i will go have a look at it, thanks


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## ccube (Jun 15, 2010)

Try SiSoft Sandra, has more benchmarking options
than most people need. The basic CPU test results are in GFLOPs.


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## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

thanks for that ccube just what i was looking for. it seems my processor is running at about 17.5 gigaflops.


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## sixpack (Jul 11, 2005)

As you know, the FLOPS measure is floating operations per second - these take longer than integer operations. FLOPS is an important measurement because CPUs of today include separate FPUs (floating point units) to handle floating point operations - the FLOPS measure is basically a benchmark of this processor subsystem. Some people will say FLOPS largely determines the real-world performance of any given processor (I don't say that... but I'm nobody special anyway).

Hertz is a measure of cycles per second (frequency). A processor that operates at a frequency of 1GHz is running at one billion cycles per second. A single cycle is traditionally the execution of a single instruction, but today's processors utilize pipelining in order to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle. As a result of pipelining, various processors will actually deliver rather different performance for any given clock speed.

(Going off-topic a bit...) For instance, AMD processors can match the performance of Intel processors (generally... there are exceptions on certain tests) at much lower frequencies because they have a shorter execution pipeline (around 12 stages I believe, where Intel is 20).


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## Grob needs help (Mar 3, 2009)

yer sixpack i had heard that before. amd has always been able to keep up with intel


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