Teraflops is a unit of measurement used for measuring the computing performance of a processor’s floating point unit. It is equal to 1,000 gigaflops, or 1,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. Teraflops may also be written as “teraFLOPS” or “TFLOPS.” The term “teraflops” is both singular and plural, since FLOPS is an acronym for “Floating Point Operations Per Second.”
While FPU performance has historically been measured in gigaflops, some modern processors run over 1,000 FLOPS, which is why new measurements are often displayed in teraflops. A similar transition has taken place with clock speeds, which are no longer measured in megahertz, but in gigahertz. Teraflops are often used to measure supercomputer performance and the rate of scientific calculations, which are based primarily on floating point operations.
