AMD (Advanced Micro Devices Inc) launches a high-performance chip package that uses a technology commonly found in graphics processors, called parallelism, and applies it to general purpose computing, media reported Friday.
The new product, called FireStream, gives AMD an answer to a similar initiative launched by rival Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) this year to find broader uses for increasingly powerful graphics chips.
The FireStream is being manufactured on an advanced, 55 nanometer manufacturing process and will use a "double precision" floating point technology for scientific and engineering calculations. The processor board includes 2G bytes of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM, a type of memory designed by ATI, and consumes under 150 watts of power, AMD said.
FireStream is based on the high-end graphics chip found in the Radeon products from AMD's ATI graphics unit and will cost 2,000 U.S. dollars, AMD said.
"People want interaction in games to be more realistic, so a lot of the underlying physics turns out to be similar to what you want to do with real-world simulation," said Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer.
"It's a very good opportunity to exploit the power and price performance advantage the GPU (graphics processing unit) gives you," Hester said.
FireStream is also a stepping stone to a major AMD project called Fusion that aims to combine a graphics processor on the same piece of silicon as a central processor by early 2009, a change that could lead to better-performing laptops.
The potential market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Hester, who also envisions that growing as people find more ways to tap the extra processing power.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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