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Equation 1 · Part 6 · Edge AI Electronics and Sensor Systems: A First-Principles Introduction

Numerator: operations per second

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

What this part means

The complete quantity above the fraction bar.

Its job in the formula

operations per second occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.

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.

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Sources cited in the article section

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