AMD announced today that its latest stream processor -- the FireStream 9250
-- offers record setting performance. AMD says that the FireStream 9250 is
optimized for high-performance computing, mainstream and consumer applications.
AMD says that its FireStream 9250 has broken
the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance. The card itself
is a single-slot design and consumes less than 150W of power. The 9250 has
performance per watt of up to eight gigaflops per watt.
The FireStream 9250 promises much faster data processing for critical
workloads like financial analysis or seismic processing than with the CPU
alone. According to AMD, developers have reported up to a 55x performance
increase on financial analysis as compared to processing on the CPU alone when
using its products.
The 9250 has second-generation double-precision floating point hardware that
delivers over 200 gigaflops. The 9250 has built on the capabilities of the
FireStream 9170, which according to AMD was the industries first GP-GPU. Memory
for the FireStream 9250 is 1GB of GDDR3. AMD also provides an AMD Stream SDK to
help developers take advantage of the processing power of its FireStream
products.
“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.
"We believe that OpenCL is a step in the right direction and we fully
support this effort. AMD intends to ensure that the AMD Stream SDK rapidly
evolves to comply with open industry standards as they emerge."
The AMD FireStream 9250 will be available in Q3 2008 for $999. The AMD
FireStream 9170 retails for $1,999. AMD’s main rival, NVIDIA
also has its own stream processing initiative with the product line called
Tesla.
