Aside from unveiling its latest Opteron processors, designed on a 45nm manufacturing process, AMD has also introduced today a new graphics card, part of its FireStream family of high-end graphics products. The just launched FireStream 9270 comes with the company's latest ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), version 1.3. These two solutions have been designed to meet the requirements of researchers, technical professionals and IT organizations. With the FireStream 9270, users will be able to enjoy more performance by enabling ATI's Radeon graphics processors to work with the system's CPUs.

 

"The demands of the high-performance datacenter are intense, with dramatic increases in problem complexity and size every year. Customers need to achieve ever higher performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar in order to address these problems with the same infrastructures. The AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerator was designed to address all of these concerns and more," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "Delivering two times the double-precision floating point performance of competing offerings, and armed with 2GB of ultra-fast, ultra-high bandwidth memory, the AMD FireStream 9270 is the ideal solution for dramatically accelerating technical applications."

 

The new FireStream 9270 graphics solution has been built to deliver a supercomputing-class performance, providing over 1.2 teraFLOPS of single-point precision performance, while still keeping the power consumption specifications to a typical board requirement of only 160W. According to the Sunnyvale, California-based company, this is the best a single-core graphics card can currently deliver. Additional features include the card's 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

 

In addition to the new FireStream 9270 graphics solution, AMD also announced version 1.3 of its Stream SDK, which is said to include extensive enhancements to provide an easier development of ATI Stream-enabled applications. This solution is expected to become available alongside ATI's Catalyst v8.12 software driver, which should debut next month.

 

Regarding pricing and availability, the new FireStream 9270 compute accelerator and the ATI Stream SDK v 1.3 are set to become available in late Q4 2008, with the FireStream 9270 to be featured at an MSRP of US$1,499.