AMD unveils teraflop processor
Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/5edmlj
AMD today announced the AMD FireStream 9250, a stream processor that will break the Teraflop barrier for single precision performance. The new chip is meant for complementing the General Purpose CPU and aid in running critical workloads such as financial analysis or seismic processing dramatically faster than with CPU alone, helping potential applications to address more complex problems and achieve faster results.
The company also announced the AMD Stream SDK, designed to help developers create accelerated applications for AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL™ and ATI Radeon™ GPUs. The current SDK is only available for Windows XP.
Sample applications that will benefit form this include
- risk assessment using Monte Carlo simulations, and for derivatives pricing using models like Black-Scholes.
- Oil and gas companies - Analyze more data in shorter periods of time to more quickly and reliably discover where resources lie, speeding discoveries of crude oil deposits.
- Web search companies with incredibly large databases to organize and sort through their data.
How much does it cost?: AMD plans to deliver the FireStream 9250 and the supporting SDK in Q3 2008 at an MSRP of $999 USD.
AMD has also joined the Khronos Compute Working Group. This working group’s goals include developing industry standards for data parallel programming and working with proposed specifications like OpenCL which allow developers to harness the power of modern graphics processing units for general purpose applications. Apple recently announced support for OpenCL in it’s next generation Mac OS X, the Snow Leopard and it continues to keep AMD out of it’s Mac product line.
Full press release is available here.
