AMD announces FireStream 9170, first dedicated stream proces
Posted by zhiVago on 08 November 2007 - 17:55 · 2 comments & 2810 views
About the Author
Full name: Unknown
Forum name: +zhiVago
Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Full name: Unknown
Forum name: +zhiVago
Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Slashdot It!
Submit to reddit
Submit to blinklist
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add to furl
Share on Facebook
Add to Windows Live
Add to Google- Advertisement
-
-
#1 Posted by xMorpheousx416 on 08 Nov 2007 - 18:56
- Was thinking about this the other day when news was posted about how passwords were being cracked at a much faster rate using GPUs instead of CPUs.
Since then, it's made all the sense in the world to finally get away from a CPU's single instruction pipeline, and go to multiple/parallel processing pipelines. Seems to me, that one company can add all the L2/L3 cache and SSE instruction sets that are physically possible on a die and hit yet another dead end as we've seen with the Ghz race. CPUs that harness the power of multiple thread processing like GPUs seems to be a better paradigm shift for the future of computing.
Large companies may dominate the market, might be the most used, but that doesn't always mean they lead the way to a better, more reliable future for computing.
“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 FireStream 9170
The AMD FireStream 9170 will be the world’s first Stream GPU with double-precision floating point technology tailored for scientific and engineering calculations. Competitively priced at an MSRP of $1999 USD, it features up to 500 GFLOPS1 of compute power, rivalling many of today’s supercomputers, and providing dramatic acceleration for critical algorithms. This second generation Stream Processor is built with 55 nm process technology and consumes less than 1502 watts of power – delivering an exceptional performance per watt. 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.
“GPUs have long been known for their immense parallel processing performance but many challenges still remain in driving widespread customer adoption for general purpose compute,” said Jon Peddie, President, Jon Peddie Research. “Leveraging its unique capabilities in high-performance CPU and GPU technologies, AMD is well positioned to drive an integrated hardware and software proposition that can deliver the best of both processing worlds to its HPC customers.”