A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). It is a description used by computer companies to describe how many multiplications can be performed within one second.
To give you an idea of how fast a teraflop microchip operates, compare it to a simple desk calculator. It has an average speed of about 10 FLOPS. When we perform operations on these calculators, it appears the operations are instant. For a calculator to operate at 1 Teraflop, the calculation would have to perform at 10 to the 12th power.
To give a perspective of a trillion, a trillion seconds ago is 31,688 years.
Intel has introduced a prototype of a future processor with 80 cores capable, they say, of performing a trillion operations per second (1 Teraflop), at a power consumption of 62 watts at a clock frequency of 3.12GHz on a chip the size of your fingernail. Of course this is a future looking statement, so all bets are off until it is actually introduced at a reasonable cost to the market as a whole.
Apparently Moore’s Law still holds true – computing power will double every 18 months or so.
