You've heard of flops, a.k.a floating point operations per second, before in video game circles. Who can forget the riveting moment in former Sony exec Ken Kutaragi's 2005 E3 PS3 presentation when he talked about how many gigaflops the system's processors would be capable of? Boring tech presentations aside, flops are great indicators of computing power. Today's consoles sit in the gigaflop range but, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, they'll get exponentially more powerful in less than a decade.
PCWorld has the exec saying speeds of 41.5 teraflops will be attainable by 2019. Today, it takes a specially built, energy-intensive supercomputer to achieve that but these proposed future machines will run off standard 100-watt power grid. What does that mean in terms of performance? Well, real-time graphics in future consoles will look as good as the best pre-rendered cutscenes in today's games. And that's just for starters. So, 2019 can't get here soon enough.
Nvidia: Gaming Systems to Reach 'Tens of Teraflops' by 2019
[PC World]