TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second)

TOPS is a number that shows how many calculations an AI chip can crank out in a single second. Just as horsepower sums up an engine's strength in one figure, TOPS boils a chip's computing power down to a single number. The higher the number, the faster the chip can digest the flood of data pouring in from cameras and sensors, and the quicker it can make decisions based on that data.

A self-driving car, for instance, has to read video and distance data about its surroundings in real time, every single moment, and decide what to do next. Because that workload is enormous, TOPS is often used as a key benchmark when picking a chip. But the number alone doesn't tell the whole story of real-world performance. Even at the same TOPS rating, how efficiently a chip actually gets work done can vary depending on its design and intended use.

The article notes that "according to figures released by Waymo, the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of processing power." Here, TOPS isn't a measure of how 'smart' the chip is overall, but purely a speed metric for how fast it can crunch numbers. A higher TOPS doesn't automatically mean safer self-driving; it's more accurate to read it as an indication of how much computational headroom is available for the tasks at hand.