It's not a gigaflop but a gigaflops and the flops part of it doesn't stand for a floating operation but floating operation per second.
While I agree with you in principle, consider that a unit that ends in the letter 'S' is inconvenient because then you can't easily refer to a quantity of one. For this article, the recurring appearance of the 1-gigaflops performance level in Apple's various form factors was the central point, and "gigaflop" makes it that much easier to discuss.
Yes, you can. The quantity of "1" is easily referred to be specifying the number of units as "1", e.g., 1 gigaflops.
Its prone to incorrect intuition about the singular form being different from the plural, but even among English nouns, "units of measurement ending in 's'" aren't the only case where the plural and singular are the same.
> "gigaflop" makes it that much easier to discuss.
It doesn't make it any easier to discuss; if someone knows what the acronym stands for, its obviously clear in its original and correct form, and if someone doesn't, you need to explain what it means anyway, at which point the incorrect form becomes disconnected from the expansion and less mnemonic, whereas the correct form is (as acronyms tend to be) a mnemonic device for the expansion.
The incorrect form may make it more convenient as completely opaque jargon, but I'm not sure making that more convenient is in anyone's interest.
One flops
Two giga- floating point operations per second
Two gigaflops
When the pluralization happens in the middle of the acronym it becomes weird -- one FLOPS, two FLOPsS?
Anyway, you're right, they would all get an S at the end either way.
A better example would be "captcha." You'd say "two captchas," not "two captcha" or "two captscha."
For a less polite example that works the same way, consider MILF.
Two gigaflosps?
Fairly recently, someone near me was talking about "megaflops per second". I made a joke about computing while falling into informational singularities. It did give me a fun mental diversion, trying to imagine a physics where computational speed was tied to some sort of data density, and then I realized that Vernor Vinge sort of got there first, with _Fire Upon the Deep_.