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Equation 1 · Part 5 · Edge AI Electronics and Sensor Systems: A First-Principles Introduction

Denominator: W

η  =  TOPSW  =  operations per secondpower draw (W)\eta \;=\; \frac{\text{TOPS}}{\text{W}} \;=\; \frac{\text{operations per second}}{\text{power draw (W)}}
W\text{W}

What this part means

The complete quantity below the fraction bar; it must be nonzero for this division.

Its job in the formula

W occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.

The passage around this formula

TOPS , tera-operations per second, measures raw throughput: how many multiply-accumulate operations a chip can, in principle, perform in a second. It says nothing about power, and by itself it is close to useless for comparing edge hardware, because a processor is free to spend arbitrarily large power to hit a large TOPS number. The metric that actually matters for a battery-powered or thermally constrained device is efficiency — operations delivered per unit of energy, conventionally reported as TOPS per watt : η  =  TOPSW  =  operations per secondpower draw (W)\eta \;=\; \frac{\text{TOPS}}{\text{W}} \;=\; \frac{\text{operations per second}}{\text{power draw (W)}}. Because a watt is a joule per second, η\eta measured this way is numerically the same quantity as operations delivered per joule. That equivalence matters because…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

Open the illustrated fractions: division written vertically guide →

Sources cited in the article section

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