K, my friend and I were arguing over memory names. I was upgrading my RAM to like 900something just cause some place is selling 512 for 99dollars. Anyway, wouldnt 1024megs of Ram be a gigaflop or a gigabyte? Would it be a gigabyte and RUN at a gigaflop??? He says that “flops” are used to describe something with video cards. I think that it is a gigabyte, but it runs at a gigaflop?? Who is right(if one of us is)???
It’s a gigabyte. But what do I know? I never even heard of a gigaflop.
In computers, FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Floating-point is, according to IBM, “a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.” Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily. A floating-point number is expressed as a basic number or mantissa, an exponent, and a number base or radix (which is often assumed). The number base is usually ten but may also be 2. Floating-point operations require computers with floating-point registers. The computation of floating-point numbers is often required in scientific or real-time processing applications and FLOPS is a common measure for any computer that runs these applications.
Don’t Ask is correct in his definition of a GFLOP. Your RAM would be 1GB (gigabyte.) Also, realize that GFLOPS are not a standard measurement. You don’t buy a processor that is rated in GFLOPS. The MHz/GHz rating (MegaHertz/GigaHertz) is the indication of the processor’s (or RAM, which is run off a memory bus, which is equal to or a fraction of the system bus) clock speed. It’s basically a timekeeping device that tells the switches in the RAM/Processor/chipset when to activate and move to the next state. GFLOPS have nothing to do whatsoever with RAM, but can be used to measure performance of the main processor, or the video processor. MHz/GHz can be used to ESTIMATE the speed of a processor, but it’s certainly not the only factor in determining speed.
Jman
[nitpick]
Actually, Apple has been selling computers rated at greater than 1 GFLOPS (supercomputers) for a couple of years now. http://www.apple.com/g4/ People buy them because they are fast at floating point operations. It sounds like the new 64 bit Itanium might finally be able to give the G4 based machines a run for the money.
[/nitpick]
FLOPS are usually based on 64, 80, 96 or 128 bit floating point representations. [The number of bits varies depending on what year it is] The width of the data bus 8,16,32,64,128 bits obviously has an effect on how quickly a floating point number can be moved into the processor.
Amount of information is measured in bits or bytes. One bit can store either 1 or 0. One byte (= 8 bits) is enough to store one character, and about two bytes are needed to store a 5-digit number. Memory chips are information storage devices, so its size is also measured in bits or bytes. One kilobyte (KB) is a thousand bytes, a megabyte (MB, what you referred to as a “meg”) is a million bytes, and a gigabyte (GB) is a billion bytes. (Well, to be more precice, one KB is 1024 bytes, one MB is 1024 KB and so on.)
FLOPS is a unit of processor performance and has nothing to do with memory.
>> One byte (= 8 bits)
Only up to a certain point. This thread ended becoming an argument about that. I believe I was arguing your side but I am not dure as I just oppose whatever is being said 