They also bury the lede somewhat. Apparently the KiloCore is a 1.78 Terahertz chip:
> The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second
Edit: they later say it's 1.78 GHz. I guess "trillion" is just a mistake?
I wouldn't say they are a 1.78THz chip or 65KMPH car, but like them.
I think this makes even less sense as we go to 1,000 processing elements -- even Amdahl's law is too optimistic for the workloads deployed in these scenarios (i.e., having an embarrassingly parallel computation workload doesn't help if we still need to access memory, including going through the shared interconnect(s) to do this, while also keeping cache coherence in mind--and most workloads have phases that have to be synchronized, assuming we eventually want to write the results of our computation somewhere): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ddperf/archive/2009/04/29/parallel-s...
The trick is that getting 1.78 trillion IPS distributed over 1000 cores is very different from getting that over a few cores.
Assuming a job is embarrassingly parallel it might be an ok metric. Realistically, probably not.