The new Xbox One is codenamed “Project Scorpio,” Microsoft announced during its E3 presentation Monday.
The word teraflops sent Twitter into a fit of snickering.
“I know ‘teraflop’ is an actual term and all that, but it still sounds incredibly silly when used in conversation or promotion,” Vincent Lovallo tweeted.
“The unit ‘teraflop’ was named in order to make grownups sound ridiculous at video game conferences,” wrote Malcolm Barseclap.
A teraflop is a measure of computer graphics processing speed. Tera means trillion. Flop is an acronym for “floating-point operations per second,” a term that describes the rate of calculations on real numbers.
If a processor is clocked at 6 teraflops, that means it can calculate 6 trillion math problems in one second. And the more crunching it can do the the better the graphics will be on the new console. (Microsoft says Project Scorpio will be able to run 4K resolution gaming and “high fidelity VR.”)
