Glossary

CpF stands for "Cycles per FLOP", and measures the efficiency of a processor. A 500MHz CPU performs 500,000,000 cycles each second, but typically its computing speed will be lower than 500 MegaFLOPS. This is because, in real-life conditions, several factors make it so that usually it takes several cycles to perform a single elementary floating point operation. CpF expresses the average number of cycles needed to compute 1 FLOP. It is obtained by dividing the CPU clock frequency (expressed in Hz) by the CPU speed (expressed in FLOPS).

A Fast Fourier Transform (abbreviated as FFT) is an algorithm frequently used in signal analysis.

FLOP is an acronym for FLoating point OPeration. A floating point operation is meant to be an elementary operation (such as sum, subtraction, multiplication, division). FLOPs (the lowercase s suffix stands for the plural, and should not be confused with FLOPS) are used as measure of the amount of computation to perform.

A MegaFLOP corresponds to 10⁶ FLOPs, a GigaFLOP is 10⁹ FLOPs, and a TeraFLOP is 10¹² FLOPs.

FLOPS is an acronym for FLoating point Operations Per Second. This is used to express the speed of a processor, and it measures the number of FLOPs that are processed in one second. Hence, for example, a CPU that processes 1.2 GigaFLOPs per minute, has a speed of

MegaFLOPS, GigaFLOPS, and TeraFLOPS stand for 10⁶, 10⁹, and 10¹² FLOPSs, respectively.