(1) To perform mathematical operations or general computer processing. Computers calculate, compare and copy (see
3 C's).
(2) Computational power in datacenters. For example, "the chip delivers 800 teraFLOPS of compute" means 800 teraFLOPS of computing power. Today, compute often refers to the chips, servers and datacenters supporting AI training and inference. See
computer horsepower and
training compute.