A single arithmetic step in which a computer’s work is counted. An EFLOPS is a billion billion of them a second. Chapter 2.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 2 — The Discovery That Changed Everything
How a formula about compute and capability became a bill: the scaling laws, the first supercomputers built to test them, and why the money came before the paper.
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Floating-point operation.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/floating-point-operation (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-floating-point-operation-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Floating-point operation}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/floating-point-operation},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}