For a while now scientific and engineering projects have been using what are basically computer video cards to get significantly more powerful computer systems than are seen when using traditional CPUs. The performance gains come from the fact that each stream processor on modern video cards can be used like an individual processor core. Rather than only four cores in a CPU, the video card offers in the area of 320 processing cores thanks to the high number of stream processors.

AMD announced its latest FireStream processor called the AMD FireStream 9250. The 9250 is designed to accelerate HPC, mainstream and consumer applications. The 9250 fits into a single PCI slot and consumes under 150W of power and AMD says it has a performance per watt efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

The FireStream 9250 includes second generation double-precision floating point hardware with over 200 gigaflops. The FireStream 9170 was the first GP-GPU to offer double-precision floating point support. The 9250 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory. The 9250 is scheduled to be available in Q3 2008 at $999.

AMD