How many gflops can a modern desktop PC do?

[StinkyPinky]

I was looking at the list of worlds most "powerful" computers and it leads with a computer that can do 8100 tflops. Problem is I have no idea how that really compares. So for example, what can a modern high end desktop PC manage?

 

[mfenn]

Theoretical peak for a 3.4 GHz quad-core Sandy Bridge running AVX enabled code would be:

8 Floating point ops per cycle per core * 3.4 Giga cycles per second * 4 cores = 108.8 GFLOPs. So, the K computer is about 75,000 times more powerful (theoretically) than your desktop.

Now, you'll never actually get theoretical peak on a real code, but you can get pretty close on something that's optimized.

 

[Mark R]

If you use the GPU, then you've got a lot more FLOPS at your disposal.

A Radeon 6990 can do over 5 TFLOPS on suitable parallel compute code.

 

[dx11101]

Theoretical peak for a 3.4 GHz quad-core Sandy Bridge running AVX enabled code would be:

8 Floating point ops per cycle per core * 3.4 Giga cycles per second * 4 cores = 108.8 GFLOPs. So, the K computer is about 75,000 times more powerful (theoretically) than your desktop.

Now, you'll never actually get theoretical peak on a real code, but you can get pretty close on something that's optimized.

Yeah but it would beat a super computer from the early 90's. One little desktop vs the technology, a giant computer, and multimillions dumped into a super computer at the time. Thing is, those old super computers had tons of ram for how fast they would be today. Wayyy more then what we have in todays above average computers.

 

[qhead]

What really blows my mind is that iPhone has more processing power than the computers that were used to send man to the moon. And we use that power to throw birds to pigs.

 

[z1ggy]

What really blows my mind is that iPhone has more processing power than the computers that were used to send man to the moon. And we use that power to throw birds to pigs.

Yeah but those pigs are evil...