AMD FIRESTREAM 9270 GPU SOFTWARE
AMD FIRESTREAM 9270 GPU SERIES

AMD FIRESTREAM 9270 GPU SOFTWARE

Still, AMD and its ATI Stream processors and software have begun to put pressure on Nvidia. Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, suggested in an e-mail that for now, Nvidia has been edging out AMD thanks to both its GP-GPUs and its emphasis on CUDA as a programming language. ( AMD also support MicrosoftвЂ™s DirectX APIs.) For its part, Nvidia has its own language called CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture. The original name that AMD used referred to this as вЂњFusion.вЂќ (An AMD spokeswoman at first said these APU processors will not appear until 2012 but the company called back later saying no firm launch date has ever been set.)ДЄMD is also supporting OpenCL, a type of computing language that allows the GPU to be programmed like a CPU and which is being supported by a number of companies including AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple and IBM. While Nvidia is focusing on the GPU and Intel is sticking with the CPU technology it knows best, AMD is looking to bridge the gap and combine its traditional CPU technology with the graphics technology it inherited when the company bought ATI in 2006.Д®ventually these two chip technologies will converge in what AMD is calling APUs, or accelerated processing units. Intel is expected to join the race in 2009 or 2010 when it releases вЂњLarrabee,вЂќ which is based on CPU cores instead of GPU cores.

AMD FIRESTREAM 9270 GPU SERIES

In addition to AMD and its FireStream GPUs, Nvidia offers its Tesla series of GPUs and the graphics company added to its lineup earlier this year with the Tesla 10 series that offers 1 teraflop of performance. вЂњIn these areas, making a decision 50 milliseconds faster or a little bit better could be worth billions of dollars in these markets.вЂќ вЂњBoth oil and gas and finance have been two areas that have adopted this type of technology early,вЂќ said Patricia Harrell, director of AMDвЂ™s Stream Computing business. These types of GP-GPU for HPC are beginning to increase as all the major chip vendors are looking at new ways to increase performance and better handle the massive workloads needs in fields such as oil and gas exploration, mechanical design, finance and traditional science and research fields. The AMD FireStream 9270, which will hit the market in December, sells for $1,499. The FireStream 9270 also offers up to 2GB of GDDR5 (graphics double data rate version 5) memory and works within a 160-watt thermal envelope. With the FireStream 9270, AMD increased the single-precision performance to 1.2 teraflops and the companyвЂ™s engineers boosted the GPUвЂ™s ability to handle double-precision performance to 240 gigaflops, which allows the FireStream 9270 to handle much more complex scientific applications and process data much faster. In June, the company offered the AMD FireStream 9250, which offers 1 teraflop or 1 trillion calculations per second of single-precision floating point performance. The AMD FireStream 9270 is one of several of these GP-GPUs that AMD has brought to the HPC market since November 2007. Unlike a CPU, a GPU or GP-GPU contains hundreds of smaller stream processing cores and allows the softwareвЂ™s instructional threads to run in parallel, breaking the information down into smaller pieces, which provides for high throughput and better performance for various applications without relying as much on cranking the clock speeds. While HPC and supercomputers were based on more traditional CPU architectures for years, Nvidia and AMD are each beginning to develop new generations of graphics processors for the field that will allow applications to work faster and more efficiently. The AMD FireStream GPUs are part of what the company refers to as ATI Stream, which looks to solve complex HPC problems by using the technology original development for the graphics market. 13, the same day AMD will release its latest quad-core Opteron processor called вЂќ Shanghai,вЂќ the company will also launch the AMD FireStream 9270, a general purpose GPU (GP-GPU) that competes against the Nvidia Tesla 10 GPU in the HPC market.

AMD is also expanding its software development kit for developers creating applications for this growing field. Advanced Micro Devices is adding additional muscle to its line of FireStream graphics processing units with a new stream processor that looks to boost the companyвЂ™s offering around high-performance computing.

Amd firestream 9270 gpu