14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt the majority of end-users aren't especially concerned with anything besides the consumer-oriented and, perhaps, business-aimed products that PC makers and hardware suppliers deal in. As such, consumers aren't exactly likely to know of the latest events in such areas as data center market or HPC (high-performance computing). This state of affairs may just change, even if just slightly, now that one particular company has made a certain move.
Advanced Micro Devices has entered the HPC market in force. To be more specific, it has developed a series of GPU computing accelerators that travel under the name of the FireStream Series and are eager to take on the Fermi-based NVIDIA Tesla products. Currently, there are two models available, the single-slot FireStream 9350 and the dual-slot FireStream 9370. The two new products are cards powered by the CPU and GPU maker's Evergreen graphics processing unit and have 2GB and 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM, respectively. Additionally, they deliver 400 and 528 FLOPS of double precision performance, as well as 2.0/2.64 TFLOPS of single precision performance.
“Heterogeneous systems in which high-performance GPU and x86 CPU technologies work in tandem can deliver enormous computational power,” said Patricia Harrell, director, Stream Computing, AMD. “Industry standards like OpenCL are driving rapid adoption of heterogeneous architectures, and commercial customers deploying systems with AMD FireStream accelerators and AMD Opteron processors can immediately experience the benefits of the combined technologies.”
“Our customers face increasingly demanding enterprise data center requirements for power consumption, cooling, and floor space, and at Supermicro our goal is to deliver solutions that offer maximum performance per watt, per square foot and per dollar,” stated Don Clegg, vice president of Marketing at Supermicro. “By offering GPU compute accelerators in combination with powerful multi-core CPUs, we are keeping pace with our customers’ demands. The AMD FireStream 9350 and 9370 compute accelerators are a natural fit for our industry-leading server solutions.”
The AMD FireStream 9350 and FireStream 9370 have TDPs (thermal design powers) of 150W and 225W, respectively, and full support for DirectX 11, OpenGL and OpenCL. They should start shipping sometime during the third quarter.