Infographic: From Kiloflops to Exaflops

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AMD’s John Fruehe blogs about the rapid pace of computer technology, including an infographic that traces performance milestones from Kiloflops in 1960 to projections of Exaflops by 2019.

A few years back, when AMD purchased ATI, it was clear to us that the future is Fusion, the merging of CPU and GPU to develop an integrated computing fabric. However, at the time, many could not see the wisdom of the strategy, but if you fast forward to today, CPUs and GPUs are finding themselves in the same processors (now called APUs) and on the server side, the continued acceleration of GPU computing.

The chart that John uses here is nice, but it may be mixing apples and oranges between peak performance and sustained
performance.

Back at Cray Research in 1991, I worked on the Gigaflop Award program, which honored six scientists who were doing application codes at sustained rates of 1 GFLOPS or more on CRAY Y-MP systems. At the time, finding true instances of a Gigaflop was not easy. With several physics applications running at sustained rates of over 1 Petaflop, today’s Cray Jaguar system is 1 Million times faster. Amazing.