How many FLOPS are in game consoles?

Analyst Opinion - Floating Point Operations Per Second - FLOPS - one of the more obscure processor performance indicators, and one of the oldest ones. Over time, it has been modified with prefixes such as M (mega), G (giga), T (tera) and will soon get a P (peta). “Tera” describes a million millions - one trillion (1012) - which is a whole lot of anything whether it is cycles (Hertz), bytes, dollars, or FLOPS.

Recently I was asked how many TFLOPS are in all the game consoles shipped to date. There are two answers to that question. You can look at it from the perspective of all the game consoles built and you can look at this question with specific consoles in mind.

Let’s look at the combined TFLOPS rating of all game consoles, which actually provides two answers as well.

If you count central processor FLOPS then you have one answer and if you count the FLOPS potential of the GPU and add it to the CPU’s FLOPS, then you have the second answer. This second version is controversial since the FLOPS of the GPU aren’t used in computations and some therefore claim that the GPU should not be counted as it simply represents a theoretical number. Others argue that GPUs are used in computation - the computation of shader operations. Both sides, however, agree that there isn’t yet a benchmark that can measure this discipline. And therefore I conclude that we shouldn’t use them in evaluating the CPU FLOPS of game consoles.

The following table lists the FLOPS in consoles: