page_title: Performance per watt
section_title: FLOPS per watt
hierarchical_section_title: Performance per watt / FLOPS per watt
context_page_description: In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems.
  System designers building parallel computers, such as Google's hardware, pick CPUs based on their performance per watt of power, because the cost of powering the CPU outweighs the cost of the CPU itself.
context_section_description: FLOPS per watt is a common measure. Like the FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) metric it is based on, the metric is usually applied to scientific computing and simulations involving many floating point calculations.
caption: Exponential growth of supercomputer performance per watt based on data from the Green500 list. The red crosses denote the most power efficient computer, while the blue ones denote the computer ranked#500.