APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR INSTRUCTION-BASED FLOP ACCOUNTING

An apparatus and method are described for floating point operation (FLOP) accounting. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: an instruction fetch unit to fetch instructions from system memory, the instructions including at least one masked vector floating point instruction to perform operations on a plurality of floating point data elements; a mask register to store a mask value associated with the masked vector floating point instruction; a decoder to decode the masked vector floating point instruction; and floating point operations (FLOP) accounting circuitry to read the mask register to determine a number of floating point operations to be performed during execution of the masked vector floating point instruction.