Following the introduction of its new line of energy-efficient Opteron processors, Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest manufacturer of computer processors, has also announced that its line of ATI Radeon HD 4800 series of graphics cards is now available in some of the highest-performance iMac and Mac Pro configurations. Combining the chip maker's high-end graphics solutions with Apple's latest Snow Leopard operating system, which is fully compliant with OpenCL version 1.0, enables users to take full advantage of the ATI Stream technology, which allows developers to optimize their applications to use both the CPU and GPU resources, consequently delivering a superior performance.

“Software developers can better serve end-users through open standards and OpenCL, a major component of Snow Leopard, that enables AMD’s ATI Stream technology to accelerate mainstream applications through the processing power of a GPU,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. “Whether you’re enjoying HD multimedia content or playing the newest games, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 in the latest Mac Pro and iMac help ATI Stream-enabled applications run faster.”

According to the Sunnyvale, California-based company the high-performance Radeon HD 4870 graphics card is available for the latest Mac Pro system, while the ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU is ready for the latest iMac. These two cards have enabled AMD to reclaim some of the market share it has lost to NVIDIA over the years, providing users with a high-performance graphics solution that comes in a more affordable package, when compared to similar products from NVIDIA.

OpenCL 1.0, present in the latest Apple operating system, is an important part of AMD's ATI Stream technology, which enables devs to leverage multi-core CPU and GPU architectures to enable high performance in optimized applications.