AMD launches FireStream 9250 with 200Gflops DP via RV770
Tuesday 17th June 2008, 10:58:00 PM, written by Rys
AMD have announced a new FireStream product based on their upcoming RV770 GPU, with some seriously impressive single and double precision peak rates.
The FireStream 9250 comes with 1GiB of GDDR3, and the 800 ALUs in the processors combine via an impressive chip clock to produce peak single precision FP32 performance of over 1Tflop, with 200Gflops double precision as a product of how the architecture used the ALUs to compute those results.
While the hardware architecture isn't as immediately amenable to being able to extract those peak rates, compared to the product's immediate competition, if you can make the computation fit then performance is undoubtedly going to be impressive. For reference, the headline DP rate is about 2x higher than the PowerXCell 8i, which was the fastest performing DP-capable processor readily available before the FireStream 9250 was announced.
Programming a FireStream 9250 will be most commonly done via Brook+ and the AMD Stream SDK, with CAL available for those with no fear of directly programming a GPU with the raw ISA. AMD have also said that they'll support OpenCL, or Open Compute Language, so FireStream support is guaranteed at some point in the future.
The announcement is midly premature, since the product won't become available until Q3 2008, but the $1000 price is very keen, and hitting the peak rates will cost you less than 150W. Single and double precision rates are therefore available with leading performance per watt figures too. AMD have clearly used a FireStream of some kind to compute their 8Gflops/watt figure, since it seems spot on.
We'll take a closer look at the non-graphics performance of the hardware after we've take a better look at the Radeon implementation of RV770.
The FireStream 9250 comes with 1GiB of GDDR3, and the 800 ALUs in the processors combine via an impressive chip clock to produce peak single precision FP32 performance of over 1Tflop, with 200Gflops double precision as a product of how the architecture used the ALUs to compute those results.
While the hardware architecture isn't as immediately amenable to being able to extract those peak rates, compared to the product's immediate competition, if you can make the computation fit then performance is undoubtedly going to be impressive. For reference, the headline DP rate is about 2x higher than the PowerXCell 8i, which was the fastest performing DP-capable processor readily available before the FireStream 9250 was announced.
Programming a FireStream 9250 will be most commonly done via Brook+ and the AMD Stream SDK, with CAL available for those with no fear of directly programming a GPU with the raw ISA. AMD have also said that they'll support OpenCL, or Open Compute Language, so FireStream support is guaranteed at some point in the future.
The announcement is midly premature, since the product won't become available until Q3 2008, but the $1000 price is very keen, and hitting the peak rates will cost you less than 150W. Single and double precision rates are therefore available with leading performance per watt figures too. AMD have clearly used a FireStream of some kind to compute their 8Gflops/watt figure, since it seems spot on.
We'll take a closer look at the non-graphics performance of the hardware after we've take a better look at the Radeon implementation of RV770.
Tagging
amd ± firestream, 9250, rv770, double, precision, 1Tflop, really, fast, gpu, zomg
Related amd News
RWT Analyzes Bulldozer Benchmarks
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners
AMD Phenom X3 released; reviewed
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners
AMD Phenom X3 released; reviewed
