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This is awe-inspiring and almost scary, it's pretty much beyond my understanding how much data these systems are meant to process.

What is also beyond me is how someone at Nvidia thinks that the label sequence "1.00E+2; 1.00E+3; 1.00E+4; 1.00E+5; 1.00E+6" for the vertical axis in "Figure 1" is more readable than "100; 1,000; 10,000; 100,000; 1,000,000" would have been. The latter is 5 chars less (total), even. Or, if exponential notation is important for the Big Serious Computing People, then perhaps they could have dropped the ".00" part from each value? Or, if I'm allowed to dream, gone with actual exponential notation?



The exponent number is the number of zeros, its way more readable and faster to interpret than counting zeros.


It's easier to think in (possibly relative) orders of magnitude than with absolute numbers, instinctively it's what we do when we read large numbers.


It's the scientific notation, and makes the graph to be a log scale. It allows you to see they gained more than two orders of magnitude in a single generation.


I'm not sure what's the problem with the exponential notation? It shows scale in order of magnitudes.


> I'm not sure what's the problem with the exponential notation?

Same. It's just more efficient and readable that counting the 0 while considering the culture bound digit group separator norms like thousands/millions 3,3 vs laks/crore 2,2,3 cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system?useski...

Personally, I think it'd have been better to say the the .00 adding nothing: 1E2 1E3 etc would be far better.


There is a semantic difference: 1,000,000 == 1,000,000 where-as 1.00E+6 >= 1,000,000 < 1,010,000. The decimal places after the 1 in 1.00E+6 specify the precision of the measurement.


I don't think they specify any precision. It's just a way to write very large/small numbers approximately. (Though these numbers here aren't really considered large.)


They do. See wikipedia [significant figures] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#Significan...

In this case, it is pointless though, since the precision is actually known.


I think the scientific notation is much more readable. Putting in the number of zeroes quickly leads me to count it them.




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