It runs at up to 1 teraflop, which means that it can complete one trillion calculations per second. The chip in an iPhone can run at 36 megaflops or 36 million calculations per second.

Here’s a trillion:

1,000,000,000,000

Here’s a million:

1,000,000

So the new chip is faster.

Now, this is still small potatoes compared to the world’s fastest computer which runs at ten teraflops but it’s AS fast as the world’s fastest computer was ten years ago. And this is designed for commercial use.

It also has more than 50 cores. More than 50! That’s compared to the two cores found in the latest iPhone and Samsung Galaxy.

Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times was at the unveiling and says: “That means my kids may take a teraflop laptop to college — if their grades don’t suffer too much having access to 50-core video game consoles”

His write up is here and includes the word “wow” in the headline.

Whew.