← Glossary Term
TOPS
Trillions of operations per second, a headline speed number for AI chips, especially in phones and cars.
TOPS stands for trillions of operations per second. It is a rough measure of how much raw arithmetic a chip can do, and you see it most often on chips that run AI inside a device rather than in a data centre, such as in phones, laptops and self-driving cars.
Treat it the way you would treat horsepower on a car. Useful for a quick comparison, but it says nothing about how efficiently the chip runs a particular model, how much memory it can reach, or how hot it gets. Two chips with the same TOPS figure can perform very differently on the same job.
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