Game Engine Architecture, Third Edition, 3rd Edition

4 Parallelism and Concurrent Programming

Computing performance—typically measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS) or floating-point operations per second (FLOPS)—has been improving at a staggeringly rapid and consistent rate over the past four decades. In the late 1970s, the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor could muster only about 50 kFLOPS (5 × 10⁴ FLOPS), while at roughly the same time a Cray-1 supercomputer the size of a large refrigerator could opeate at a rate of roughly 160 MFLOPS (1.6 × 10⁸ FLOPS). Today, the CPU in game consoles like the Playstation 4 or the Xbox One produces roughly 100 GFLOPS (10¹¹ FLOPS) of processing power, and the fastest supercomputer, currently China’s Sunway TaihuLight, has a LINPACK benchmark ...