FLOPS & Precision Formats
Concept
Hardware & Compute
How compute is counted — and why the same chip has five different numbers.
You're looking at a concept explainer: what this term means in plain English, and the records it ties together.
FLOPS count floating-point operations per second; AI hardware quotes them per precision (FP64 → FP4), roughly doubling each halving of bits, and vendors often quote sparsity-doubled figures — always check the footnote (records here label dense vs sparse). Training compute totals (10²⁵–10²⁶ FLOP for frontier runs) anchor scaling laws and even export regulation thresholds.
How this connects to the rest of the stack
This record's links at a glance — click a group to jump to it.
Sources
Record reviewed as of 2026-01-15 — see Methodology.