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It’s time we dealt with the measurement of compute performance in GPUs. In another in a series of ARM blogs intended to enlighten and reduce the amount of confusion in the graphics industry, I’d like to cover the issue of Floating-point Operations Per Second (FLOPS, or GFLOPS or TFLOPS).

In the past, Tom Olson talked about triangles per second (“the chocolate teapot of graphics processor performance metrics”), Ed Plowman talked about pixels per second ("Of Philosophy and When is a Pixel Not a Pixel?"), ...

What a week! I am back to Cambridge after an amazing week in San Francisco at GDC. 2013 was the biggest GDC ever with over 23,000 attendees according to the organisers UBM. ARM was one of over 350 exhibitors who came together from all corners of the world onto the GDC Expo Floor, with more besides in the Independent Games Festival Pavilion, the Business Centre Area and the fascinating GDC Play showcase, where 70 emerging developers showcased their talent. GDC’s popularity both amongst exhibitors and attendees clearly prove this event to be the world #1 in the art of game-making and as the week started I was keen to see what 2013 would bring.

The event kicked off on Monday 25th March with tutorials and summits. Of course the most talked about was the Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit which got even bigger and busier compared to last year and where ARM had a tabletop. We previewed some of the demos that we planned for the larger ARM booth later in the week and non-stop traffic flowed past - the general reaction from the crowd was amazement at what our tabletop had on show and we couldn’t wait for the exhibition floor to open on Wednesday to reveal more.

Thirsty Bear, a ...