Tera operations per second (TOPS) measures a system’s theoretical peak AI performance, assuming 100% AI accelerator utilization. TOPS highlights the processing potential of neural processing units (NPUs) and graphic processing units (GPUs) for AI tasks.
You may have heard of teraFLOPS or tera floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), a similar peak performance metric based on floating-point operations. Both estimate how well a system handles compute-intensive tasks, TOPS for AI performance and TFLOPS for non-AI supercomputer performance.
TOPS is generally calculated using int8 with the formula:
TOPS = # of cores * frequency (Hz) * operations/cycle
For example, Lunar Lake will deliver up to 120 TOPS, measured at INT8 without sparsity, across three AI accelerators. This includes up to 48 TOPS from the NPU, up to 67 TOPS from the GPU, and up to 5 TOPS from the CPU.