This board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or — in terms
PC users understand — about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU.
That doesn't seem too outrageous to me.
Edit: They state the real fact and then give another figure explicitly stating it's an attempt to translate this into a metric the average user can somewhat relate to.
Second edit: I was under the impression that this was the result of dumbing down by a journalist, however it seems it's from Parallela itself. That is a bit disingenuous indeed.
Hum, no. Sandy/Ivy Bridge can only execute 4 double-precision instructions per cycle per core, in the form of two SSE instructions per cycle (one instruction doing adds, the other doing muls, executed by different units).
Doing 8 double-precision instructions per cycle would translate to either four 128-bit SSE instructions, or two 256-bit AVX instructions per cycle, which is not possible (unless I did not keep track of the latest AVX capabilities).
It should read 8 FLOPS per cycle double precision. So a 3 GHz 4 core Ivy Bridge processor could theoretically peak at 96 GFLOPS double precision, 192 GFLOPS single precision.
The only reason it isn't a big lie is that it's an utterly meaningless statement. In any case it is a misrepresentation of what modern CPUs are capable of.
Me neither. The only catch is that you can't get serial computation that fast, but I assume anyone buying something called "Parallella" would realize that already.
Edit: They state the real fact and then give another figure explicitly stating it's an attempt to translate this into a metric the average user can somewhat relate to.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Computing it seems that they're off by a factor of two, but I'm guessing that's just an honest mistake.
Second edit: I was under the impression that this was the result of dumbing down by a journalist, however it seems it's from Parallela itself. That is a bit disingenuous indeed.