Question about Processors, Operating Systems and TFLOPS

Question

Hi guys, I recently read an article about the power of the PS3 consoles. This is a table that I copied from it, which I don't really undestand. All I can see is that the Mac OSX shows the least number of TFLOPs for both PowerPC and Intel architectures. That doesn't seem to be good. If there's anyone out there who can translate the details into "basic language" I would appreciate it.
OS Type------------Current TFLOPS----Active CPUs---Total CPUs
Windows------------152--------------159564------1625622
Mac OS X/PowerPC------7----------------8737--------95371
Mac OS X/Intel---------9----------------2756----------7272
Linux----------------43---------------25126-------215901
GPU-----------------42-----------------708----------2199
PLAYSTATION®3-----516---------------21062---------22299
==============================================
Total----------------769--------------217953-------1968664
If you are further interested, or the table became unreadable, or both, this is the link to the original article.
Thank you very much in advance.
George...
MBP 15in 2.33GHz.   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   other 200+ posts with the old Discussion Forums (now lost)

Answer 1

Yes, you are misinterpreting the data.
What you're looking at is the workload on some distributed computing task like folding@home, right?
What it's telling you is that at the time you checked, Windows computers were contributing 152 TFLOPs (trillions of operations per second), PowerPC-based Macs contributed 7, Intel-based Macs added 9, and 516 from the PS3.
However, you also need to take into account the number of active machines.
Those 152 Windows TFLOPS were the combined output of 159,564 CPUs, for an average of 0.0009525958 TFLOPS/CPU.
By comparison, the 7 PowerPC TFLOPS were from 8737 CPUs, or 0..0008011903 TFLOPS/CPU - not all that much different and statistically insignificant.
The Intel Macs' 9 TFLOPS from 2756 CPUs equates to 0.0032656023 TFLOPS/CPU - significantly higher than either of the other two results.
The PS3 on the other hand contributes 516 TFLOPS from 21062 CPUs, for 0.0244990979 TFLOPS/CPU - an order of magnitude higher still.
I'd take the results with a large pinch of salt, though - is that 7 TFLOPS for the PowerPCs, 6.5, or 7.49? That makes a big difference.
Also, consider that when the PS3 is running the code, that's all its doing. Any other OS is going to be running other applications at the same time.
Don't get me wrong, the Cell processor is certainly pulling its weight, but don't discard the GPU - its 42 TFLOPS come from just 708 CPUs, for an average of 0.0593220338 TFLOPs/CPU - two and a half times that of the PS3.