14 DAY TRIAL // Although their main purpose is to deliver stunning graphics in the next-gen PC games, graphic processing units (or GPUs) also have another great quality: a large, untapped parallel processing power. And in order to take advantage of the respective resources, the people over at AMD have developed a highly innovative stream processor, the FireStream 9170, which is supposed to be the first integrated hardware and software development solution that meets the needs of the demanding high-performance computing (HPC) market.
According to the company, the AMD FireStream 9170 will be the world's first Stream GPU with double-precision floating point technology tailored for scientific and engineering calculations. It features up to 500 GFLOPS of compute power, which actually makes it quite a rival for many of today's supercomputers and provides faster processing speeds for critical algorithms.
This second generation Stream Processor is built with 55 nm process technology and consumes less than 1502 watts of power. In addition, the reduced heat dissipation allows it to function in dense design configurations. The FireStream 9170 is a single card solution with two GB of onboard GDDR3 memory to compute large datasets without CPU traffic. The asynchronous direct memory access (DMA) ensures data can flow freely without interrupting the stream processor or CPU.
As expected, the new processing solution will be accompanied by an SDK, designed to deliver the tools developers need to create and optimize applications on AMD Stream processors. Built using an open platforms approach, the AMD FireStream SDK allows developers to access key Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and specifications, enabling performance tuning at the lowest level and development of third party tools.
"With a broad range of customer engagements underway, notably customers in the oil and gas, financial and engineering analysis industries, AMD is delivering on its vision of Accelerated Computing with breakthrough benefits for our enterprise customers," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Products, AMD. "Leveraging the immense graphics processing capabilities acquired from ATI and the HPC domain expertise of AMD, we are developing strong relationships with system vendors and the supporting technology eco-system to deliver processing innovation through an open platforms approach."
AMD plans to deliver the FireStream 9170 and supporting SDK to market in the first quarter of 2008, at an estimated mean suggested retail price of around 2000 US dollars, which is not exactly a very small price, but, after all, emerging and innovative technologies are never very cheap, are they?
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