AMD Stream Processor launched, uses GPU power for general tasks

Well, AMD's achieved that stream computing thing (with the help of its latest acquisition, ATI) that we've all been hearing about for the last month and change. At the Supercomputing 2006 show down in Tampa, Florida, the company announced what it claims to be the "world's first dedicated stream processor." The new GPU, creatively named the "AMD Stream Processor," is a PCI Express card that is loaded up with 1GB of GDDR3 memory. TG Daily reports that the new processor is based on the R580 graphics processor used in ATI's Radeon X1900 graphics cards and that it has the potential of reaching 375 gigaflops. Now again, we take these numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism -- while AMD's claims of performance boosts may hold up in the lab, it's pretty unlikely that your everyday computer applications will benefit exponentially from all those floating point operations.

[Via TG Daily]

[anthonysimilion @ Nov 14th 2006 10:54PM]

Cheap way to add Folding@Home cores?

[Keaton @ Nov 14th 2006 11:48PM]

Muah!

I knew this was coming... like 2 months ago... heres what I said with no one believing me....

http://wwwfeatures.engadget.com/2006/09/29/gazing-down-intels-roadmap-quad-core-yorkfield-set-for-q3-2007/

This is super exciting... Its like the next generation of computing... that aims to be cheap and powerful... YAY!

http://www.soggycowdesigns.com

[Scabies @ Nov 14th 2006 11:51PM]

weird. it has DVI-outs and all, and the 1gb mem on a 512bit interface sounds attractive as a graphics solution and all but they say that the target market is people that have CPU intensive projects like seismic analysis and CAD and such... I'm so confused. can you crossfire this mug?

http://ati.amd.com/products/streamprocessor/index.html

[Bizzle @ Nov 15th 2006 1:26AM]

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1837371&postcount=6
"these things are not going to be cheap or cool

The Stream processor comes on a 16x PCI Express board with 1 Gbyte GDDR3 memory. It costs about $2,600 and dissipates 165W on average.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=194300199"

Sorry guys

[Brennan @ Nov 15th 2006 1:38AM]

im still planning on getting the quad-core from AMD, coming out Q2 2007, and im waiting for the R600 DX10 card from ATI to be announced; rumored to come out early 2007.hmm so what is this stream processor used for mostly? I need high-end gaming parts.

[Juaquin @ Nov 15th 2006 2:38AM]

Yeah, this will be a big thing for Folding@Home. They just started working with the X1900 series, but Stream will make it a lot easier for the researchers, no having to deal with drivers and individual differences in cards, just standard processor tasks offloaded to the Stream GPU (if I understand the concept of Stream correctly).

[Juaquin @ Nov 15th 2006 2:45AM]

Brennan:

Right now Stream is really only for research, enterprise, servers, etc. The cost for the card is way too expensive for a gaming system, and I don't think it's particularly well suited for gaming anyways. I think next year at some point we may see this technology in consumer cards and it'll benefit us gamers, but for now, set your eye on one of those shiny new 8800's.

[Aaron @ Nov 15th 2006 6:46AM]

Did anybody else first read that as Steam instead of Stream? Like, as in steam-powered?


And then think, "SWEET!"?

I really need some sleep...

[Steve @ Nov 15th 2006 8:25AM]

now lets just hope AMD can get the ATI drivers to work properly on Windows and linux...

[Andir3.0 @ Nov 15th 2006 8:45AM]

Why does everyone think floating point processes couldn't be good for games? Every vertex calculation is done via floating point math. More processing power = more vertices = more complicated objects on the screen. Textures don't benefit much from it, but if you have super detailed objects, you wouldn't need to worry about mip-mapping and all the tricks to make textures stand out. You could bump up the polygon count and focus on detail that way. Amazingly, OpenGL is good for this type of thing where DirectX focuses more on texture processing. I will only assume Microsoft will shun this as useless unless it catches on fast and they have no choice but to accept. Unfortunately, power means price right now and until this power becomes affordable, it looks like we will have to settle with "tricks of the eye" to make things look real.