AMD is introducing a high-performance chip package FireStream 9170, that uses a technology commonly found in graphics processors, called parallelism, and applies it to general purpose computing, the company announced Thursday.
Parallelism breaks computing work into individual tasks that are worked on by a processor concurrently, or in parallel, instead of one after the other, as many general purpose processors do today.
Parallelism has been in use for a long time in graphics chips from companies like ATI and Nvidia. AMD, which bought ATI last year, said the technology also works well for some types of mathematical computation, so it is using it to speed up other applications.
While the FireStream chip is ideal for processor-intensive, graphics-heavy applications, it is not designed for run-of-the-mill desktop software like word processing and Web browsing, Reuters noted. Like other high-performance chips, AMD’s latest product contains a very large number of transistors and may be more powerful than a computer’s main processor.
Reuters said FireStream is a stepping-stone project for AMD, which is working on an initiative dubbed Fusion to combine graphics and central processors on a single piece of silicon. The company hopes to roll out such a unified processing product by early 2009. Fusion technology could be used to create more powerful laptop computers where space for multiple processors is limited.
In the meantime, users looking for more graphics processing horsepower will be able to buy a FireStream chip (based on AMD’s Radeon product line built by the company’s ATI unit) for $2,000, Reuters said. The FireStream chip, to be manufactured by Taiwanese contractor TSMC, contains 660 million transistors and 320 processing units. It’s also very small: 55 nanometers wide, versus 65 nanometers for AMD’s top-end computer processors. It offers up to 500 gigaflops of computing power, according to AMD, or about 100 times the performance of one of its dual core Opterons. It will use a "double precision" floating point technology for scientific and engineering calculations. The processor board includes 2G bytes of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM, a type of memory designed by ATI, and consumes under 150 watts of power, AMD said.
AMD calls the computing style Stream Computing, and it began life at ATI before it was bought by AMD. ATI announced the first Stream product last year, but AMD didn't work hard to promote it. It is throwing more weight behind the second iteration.
AMD also announced it has joined Hewlett-Packard's HPC Accelerator Program, suggesting the product will be offered in computers from HP.
Parallelism breaks computing work into individual tasks that are worked on by a processor concurrently, or in parallel, instead of one after the other, as many general purpose processors do today.
Parallelism has been in use for a long time in graphics chips from companies like ATI and Nvidia. AMD, which bought ATI last year, said the technology also works well for some types of mathematical computation, so it is using it to speed up other applications.
While the FireStream chip is ideal for processor-intensive, graphics-heavy applications, it is not designed for run-of-the-mill desktop software like word processing and Web browsing, Reuters noted. Like other high-performance chips, AMD’s latest product contains a very large number of transistors and may be more powerful than a computer’s main processor.
Reuters said FireStream is a stepping-stone project for AMD, which is working on an initiative dubbed Fusion to combine graphics and central processors on a single piece of silicon. The company hopes to roll out such a unified processing product by early 2009. Fusion technology could be used to create more powerful laptop computers where space for multiple processors is limited.
In the meantime, users looking for more graphics processing horsepower will be able to buy a FireStream chip (based on AMD’s Radeon product line built by the company’s ATI unit) for $2,000, Reuters said. The FireStream chip, to be manufactured by Taiwanese contractor TSMC, contains 660 million transistors and 320 processing units. It’s also very small: 55 nanometers wide, versus 65 nanometers for AMD’s top-end computer processors. It offers up to 500 gigaflops of computing power, according to AMD, or about 100 times the performance of one of its dual core Opterons. It will use a "double precision" floating point technology for scientific and engineering calculations. The processor board includes 2G bytes of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM, a type of memory designed by ATI, and consumes under 150 watts of power, AMD said.
AMD calls the computing style Stream Computing, and it began life at ATI before it was bought by AMD. ATI announced the first Stream product last year, but AMD didn't work hard to promote it. It is throwing more weight behind the second iteration.
AMD also announced it has joined Hewlett-Packard's HPC Accelerator Program, suggesting the product will be offered in computers from HP.
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