Performance is rated at eight gigaflops per watt.ĪMD has a software development kit, the AMD Stream SDK, to help developers create applications that use the full abilities of the FireStream chips. Power consumption is less than 150 watts, similar to the 9170. The 9250 will fit in a single PCI slot, making it compatible with most desktop systems, workstations and servers. The 9250 comes with 1 G byte of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM memory on its PCI card, a type of memory that was designed by ATI, the graphics chip maker now owned by AMD. AMD says that helps runs intensive tasks such financial analyses and seismic processing much faster. The FireStream chips can also perform "double precision" floating-point calculations. For single-precision calculations, the 9250 tops 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, AMD said. A gigaflop is 1 billion floating-point operations per second. Last November, AMD released the FireStream 9170, the first such chip in the line that is capable of up to 500 gigaflops of computing power. The 9250 will be available by the end of September for US$1,999. The processor, which AMD refers to as a "stream processor" or General-Purpose General-Processing Unit (GP GPU) is capable of up to hundreds of parallel calculations per clock cycle, whereas other more general-purpose processors can only do a handful, the company said. FireStream can take a single instruction and execute it using multiple sources of data in parallel. It will be priced at US$999.— - Advanced Micro Devices previewed on Monday the latest version of its high-performance chip package, the FireStream 9250, which is due later this year.Ĭhips in the FireStream line offer much faster performance for mathematical calculations than other processors. OpenCL is expected to be part of Appleis next OS X release, Snow Leopard, scheduled to ship in about a year, according to Apple.ĪMD said that it plans to deliver the FireStream 9250 and the supporting SDK in Q3 2008. AMD intends to ensure that the AMD Stream SDK rapidly evolves to comply with open industry standards as they emerge." "We believe that OpenCL is a step in the right direction and we fully support this effort. "An open industry standard programming specification will help drive broad-based support for stream computing technology in mainstream applications," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD. As a result, applications will be able to access the computational power of modern GPUs, typically capable of hundreds of gigaflops, in parallel with the CPU. OpenCL is an open standard that Apple has developed that allows developers to treat CPUs and GPUs on equal footing from an API standpoint. The OpenCL specification can help provide developers with an easy path to development across multiple platforms," AMD said. This working groupis goals include developing industry standards for data parallel programming and working with proposed specifications like OpenCL. "In keeping with its open systems philosophy, AMD has also joined the Khronos Compute Working Group. The card occupies a single PCI slot and draws 150 watts.ĭevelopers have reported up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes compared to processing on the CPU alone. At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany on Monday, AMD announced its FireStream 9250 graphics card which breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision computations.
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