How to Estimate Flops From CPU Speed
Computer processes are measured at a rate of cycles per second. This rate of performance, often quantified in hertz, is often misunderstood. It is incorrect to think that a cycle is the execution of one instruction or calculation. Most of the instructions or operations performed by a processor take several cycles to complete. One of the more cycle intensive processes is the floating point operation. Floating point operations, FLOPS, are mathematical manipulations of floating point -- numbers involving a decimal point -- calculations.
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Instructions
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Determine the number of cycles a floating point operation takes. This information is available from the CPU manufacturer on their product documentation Web pages and from their print documentation. Intel provides free software developer's manuals upon request for virtually all of their CPU architectures.
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Take the reciprocal of the cycles required for a floating point operation. For example, if it takes four cycles to perform an average floating point operation, the reciprocal will be 1/4.
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Multiply this by the clock speed of the processor. The result of this calculation is the theoretical maximum FLOPS of which a CPU is capable.
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