About the challenge of evaluating AI chip performance using “TOPS”, a metric that means trillions of operations per second, or “tera operations per second”. By Jeremy Horwitz.
Over the past few years, mobile and laptop chips have grown to include dedicated AI processors, typically measured by TOPS as an abstract measure of capability. Apple’s A14 Bionic brings 11 TOPS of “machine learning performance” to the new iPad Air tablet, while Qualcomm’s smartphone-ready Snapdragon 865 claims a faster AI processing speed of 15 TOPS.
The article describes:
- TOPS, explained
- Apple on TOPS
- Qualcomm on TOPS
- Huawei, Mediatek, and Samsung on TOPS
- Top of the TOPS
Apple has tried to reduce its use of abstract numeric performance metrics over the years: Try as you might, you won’t find references on Apple’s website to the gigahertz speeds of its A13 Bionic or A14 Bionic chips, nor the specific capacities of its iPhone batteries – at most, it will describe the A14’s processing performance as “mind-blowing”… Mobile processors have become popular and critically important, but they’re not the only chips with dedicated AI hardware in the marketplace, nor are they the most powerful. Great article!
[Read More]