Monday, February 12, 2007
Random stuff
A definition I liked:
"An adventure is a tragedy that does not occur."
Upon hearing about the new Intel highspeed chip that supposedly can process teraflops, a trillion operations per second, I had to look up what a teraflop is. Then things got a little strange. There is more than one definition of billion and trillion. The number of zeros after the 1 for both "billion" and "trillion" is different in the US than it is in the UK.
It seems as though this could lead to some major confusions.
Here is how it breaks down:
US: million = 1,000,000 billion = 1,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
UK: million = 1,000,000 milliard = 1,000,000,000 (called “a thousand million”)
billion = 1,000,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
I assume that the teraflop refers to the US trillion, since Intel is a US-based company. But I wonder about how this discrepancy in the names for numbers might cause significant troubles.
"An adventure is a tragedy that does not occur."
Upon hearing about the new Intel highspeed chip that supposedly can process teraflops, a trillion operations per second, I had to look up what a teraflop is. Then things got a little strange. There is more than one definition of billion and trillion. The number of zeros after the 1 for both "billion" and "trillion" is different in the US than it is in the UK.
It seems as though this could lead to some major confusions.
Here is how it breaks down:
US: million = 1,000,000 billion = 1,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
UK: million = 1,000,000 milliard = 1,000,000,000 (called “a thousand million”)
billion = 1,000,000,000,000 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
I assume that the teraflop refers to the US trillion, since Intel is a US-based company. But I wonder about how this discrepancy in the names for numbers might cause significant troubles.
# posted by blue-foot Sue @ 7:50 PM 
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