I'm having trouble understanding nomenclature

[Addicted]

It may be a dumb question, but what exactly is the difference between hertz and flops?

[InfinityHardware]

Well, a flop is an actual measure of calculations per second. A hertz is just "something per second"

Actually, chip speed, in hertz, is a misleading way to judge processors, because it only measures the number of cycles per second that the chip can engage in. It doesn't measure the number of calculations the processor can perform.

ACTUAL processor speed is cycles x flops. So sometimes a chip that has a lower cycle rate (i.e. 1.6 vs. 1.8 gHz) will be more effective because it runs at a higher number of flops (300 PF vs. 250 PF).

[liquidity]

Just for the record, this also explain why some chips are better than others clocks for clocks.

[Addicted]

Thank you :) that clears a lot up

[Umeshwarnath]

if a chip has better IPC (instructions per clock) compared to another at the same frequency (clock speed) the the one with the better IPC will have more FLOPS i.e can perform more calculations in unit time interval !

hence why never judge a cpu just by looking at the cpu frequency (3770k @ 3.5 vs 8350 @ 4 where the 3770k is better by a bit though the 8350 has 8 cores vs 4 cores and 8 threads in 3770k and there is a lot of architectural differences!)

[allenshih1]

FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which is how many floating point, or real number, calculations can be done in one second. However clock is just something there in order to synchronize the CPU.