AMD touts new 1 teraflop stream processor
updated 12:30 pm EDT, Mon June 16, 2008
AMD FireStream 9250
AMD has announced the FireStream 9250 (not pictured), a new device in its line of stream processors. The hardware is intended to accelerate a number of supercomputing applications, such as seismic analysis or intense financial computing, supplementing the power of CPUs. AMD claims that when handling single-precision operations the 9250 is the first processor to reach the 1 teraflop level, resulting in as much as a 55x speed increase over CPU-only data processing.
This performance drops substantially when coping with double-precision calculations, to just over 200 gigaflops, but the card is said to consume under 150W of power, and connect to a single standard PCI slot. It has 1GB of GDDR3 RAM, and may eventually support the OpenCL parallel processing standard. The 9250 should ship in the third quarter of the year for $999, alongside an accompanying SDK.
