Commentary For chip makers, the AI computer has become a race against TOPS – with Intel, AMD and Qualcomm each trying to one-up the other.
55 TOPS AI Pi runs faster
As we found out last week, AMD's next-gen Ryzen 300 series will boast 50 NPU TOPS, while Intel's Lunar Lake parts will deliver 48 NPU TOPS. Meanwhile, Qualcomm and Apple have previously announced that their NPUs will do 45 and 38 TOPS, respectively.
This type of marketing is historically quite effective – bigger numbers are easier for us customers to understand. But, as is the case with clock speeds and cores, it's never as simple as marketers make it sound. This is certainly true when it comes to TOPS.
One of the biggest problems is that TOPS—how many trillion-byte operations your chip can process per second—is missing an important piece of information: precision. What this means is that 50 TOPS at 16-bit precision is not the same as 50 TOPS at 8-bit or 4-bit precision.
