kiloFLOPS

KiloFLOPS is a unit of computing performance equal to one thousand floating-point operations per second. A FLOP is a floating-point operation, such as addition or multiplication. The prefix kilo- denotes 10^3, so 1 kFLOPS equals 1,000 floating-point operations per second.

Historically, the term arose when performance was commonly measured in thousands of operations per second. In modern practice, higher-scale terms are more common: MFLOPS (million), GFLOPS (billion), TFLOPS (trillion), and so on. KiloFLOPS remains relevant for very simple or resource-constrained devices, such as microcontrollers or educational benchmarks, where performance is well under one million FLOPS.

Measurement of kFLOPS typically involves running a benchmark that executes a fixed number of floating-point operations and records the elapsed time, then computing operations per second. Results depend on factors such as the programming language, compiler optimizations, processor features like SIMD, and whether the measurement reflects peak theoretical or sustained real-world throughput.

Limitations of FLOPS-based metrics include their focus on arithmetic throughput alone, without accounting for memory bandwidth, latency, I/O, or program-level efficiency. Therefore, kFLOPS is not a comprehensive performance indicator; meaningful comparisons require consistent benchmarking across the same tasks and platforms.

Conversions follow the standard prefixes: 1 kFLOPS = 1,000 FLOPS; 1 MFLOPS = 1,000 kFLOPS; 1 GFLOPS = 1,000,000 kFLOPS; 1 TFLOPS = 1,000,000,000 kFLOPS.