FLOP - exact definition I am interested in how much a GPU can actually calculate. When learning about rendering, it seems like a good idea as well.
My Question:
WHAT EXACTLY is a Floating Point Operation?
I know what a floating point number is.
Now, when reading other questions and articles about it, they always say, any simple operation, + - * / , would be a floating point operation, which makes sense in terms of the word itself
BUT:   A multiplication is (obviously) often &quot;far&quot; more (calculating) than an addition, isn't it?!
(Apart from the sheer size of the calculation)
Following, just a simple example for demonstration:
5+5=       5+5
5*5=       5+5+5+5+5
So does the term &quot;flop&quot; actually just describe additions and subtractions
or is a flop in the end just a very rough definition?
Or is the GPU somehow equally fast at all of those calculations?
Thanks in advance.
Just to add to whychmaster's reply, in my experience, on a GPU, a floating-point operation, when used in quoting FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) benchmark figures will refer to Addition (equiv subtraction) and Multiplication.
The other standard IEEE operators, division + sqrt, are more computationally expensive and so unlikely to be included in the figure. (Note that, there is often HW support in GPUs for accelerating operations like 1/x, 1/sqrt(x) etc, perhaps to make them as (or nearly as) fast as muls &amp; adds)
Having said that, it is very likely that a GPU will actually implement a Fused Multipy-Add operation, FMAD, i.e. do  A * B + C in &quot;one step&quot; as this is

more accurate than doing separate multiply and add instructions
is faster than separate ops
is about the same silicon cost
is a very common building block of CG operations (e.g dot products, convolutions)

I suspect that in quoted figures, though, an FMAD would be considered 2 operations.