[Ads-l] Words: ronnaFLOP quettaFLOP =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=93_?=measurements of computation

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Professor of Management Ethan Mollick recently used the term
"ronnaFLOP" when discussing the new AI model Grok 4. Here are two
xtweets:

Xtwitter handle: Ethan Mollick @emollick
Timestamp: 1:32 AM Jul 10, 2025
https://x.com/emollick/status/1943181413152624827

[Begin excerpt]
I suspect the next few weeks after Grok 4 follows the same pattern as Grok 3
xAI beats everyone to market with the first RonnaFLOP model. The
benchmarks show the 10-20% improvement the scaling law suggests. In
the coming months, the other labs release their RonnaFLOPs, catch up.
[End excerpt]

Xtwitter handle: Ethan Mollick @emollick
Timestamp: 11:40 AM Jul 10, 2025
https://x.com/emollick/status/1943334637746454873

[Begin excerpt]
For context:
RonnaFLOP: 10^27 FLOPS (Floating point operations, a measure of
computing power), This is the compute that went into Grok 4 as I
interpreted what they said on the live stream.
GPT-4 was likely around 18 YottaFLOPs (1.8*10^25), 100x smaller
Scaling improves ability.
[End excerpt]

A 2022 article in USA Today indicates that "ronna" is a relatively new prefix.

Date: November 22, 2022
Website: USA Today
Article: Meet the new names for huge and tiny numbers: The metric
system has gotten an update
Author: Mike Snider (USA Today)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/22/metric-system-ronna-quetta-ronto-quecto-prefixes/10737335002/

[Begin excerpt]
Here are the new prefixes:
quetta – 10 to the 30th power or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
ronna – 10 to the 27th power or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
ronto – 10 to the negative 27th power.
quecto – 10 to the negative 30th power.
[End excerpt]

I checked the OED to look for the "ronna" prefix and did not find it.
The OED does have: megaflop noun, teraflop noun
The OED also has these prefixes which are used at the frontier of
computation: zetta- combining form,  yotta- combining form.

Wikipedia has this table for "Floating point operations per second"

megaFLOPS MFLOPS 10^6
gigaFLOPS GFLOPS 10^9
teraFLOPS TFLOPS 10^12
petaFLOPS PFLOPS 10^15
exaFLOPS EFLOPS 10^18
zettaFLOPS ZFLOPS 10^21
yottaFLOPS YFLOPS 10^24
ronnaFLOPS RFLOPS 10^27
quettaFLOPS QFLOPS 10^30

Garson

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org