HPCwire: AMD Releases New FireStream Accelerator

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November 13, 2008

AMD Releases New FireStream Accelerator

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New hardware and software, plus strong collaboration with Aprius, HP and others demonstrates continued efforts to bring supercomputing-class processing to organizations at a fraction of typical cost and power requirements

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 13 -- AMD today announced the new AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerator and the latest version of its free and open ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), version 1.3. Both are designed to help researchers, technical professionals and IT organizations use mainstream computing platforms to address challenges that once would have required multi-million-dollar investments in proprietary hardware and software.

Today's announcements also advance the company's corporate brand and strategy, called Fusion, by further enabling AMD graphics processors (GPUs) to work in concert with CPUs to deliver balanced platforms capable of increasing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

"The demands of the high-performance datacenter are intense, with dramatic increases in problem complexity and size every year. Customers need to achieve ever higher performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar in order to address these problems with the same infrastructures. The AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerator was designed to address all of these concerns and more," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the graphics products group at AMD. "Delivering two times the double-precision floating point performance of competing offerings, and armed with 2GB of ultra-fast, ultra-high bandwidth memory, the AMD FireStream 9270 is the ideal solution for dramatically accelerating technical applications."(1)

The AMD FireStream 9270 delivers supercomputing-class performance, deployable in a wide variety of server and workstation configurations. It has a typical board power requirement of only 160 watts, yet provides over 1.2 teraFLOPS of single-point precision performance -- the most available in a single-GPU solution today -- and over 240 gigaFLOPS of double-point precision performance.1 It includes two gigabytes of Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5 memory (GDDR5) for greater overall data throughput and processing of larger data-sets. It comes with a three-year limited warranty.

System and Software Developers

AMD is working with leading system and software developers to help ensure broad availability of GPU accelerated end-solutions for a wide range of uses.

One such company is Aprius, which develops high bandwidth server interconnect systems that bring new levels of scaling, resource sharing and low-latency performance to the data center.

With help from AMD, Aprius plans to bring to market a solution for connecting up to eight AMD FireStream 9270 computer accelerators within a rack mounted chassis, hosted in a server cluster via multiple 80 Gbps PCI Express (PCIe) optical links. This results in 9.6 teraFLOPS of processing horsepower and 16GB of high speed memory over up to four PCIe buses. Dubbed the Aprius Computational Acceleration System, it provides new innovations in native PCIe interconnect over optical cables that allows PCIe 2.0 connections up to 50m in length, easy in-rack installation and maintenance, and transparent support for all OS environments. The technology is expected to be demonstrated at Supercomputing 2008 in Austin, Texas, next week.

AMD is also working closely with long-time partner HP on the HP Accelerator Program, to ensure AMD FireStream compute accelerators are validated for use in HP ProLiant servers.

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