AMD unveils powerful 'stream computing' chip
AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.
The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the
The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast as possible, the cool kids are now adding paths so data can flow down multiple outlets. This allows the chip to run at slower speeds, and therefore
Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been doing this for years. The high-performance discrete graphics chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD's ATI division have been designed with parallel performance in mind for a very long time. Certain types of customers in labs and research facilities would love to be able to tap into that kind of processing power, but GPUs require special programming techniques.
AMD is trying to bridge the gap between PC processors that are easy to program and graphics chips that offer great performance with the FireStream 9170. Think of it as a high-end graphics chip with a lot more memory than usually ships with those products, said Robert Feldstein, vice president of engineering for AMD.
The performance will be there. The 9170 is essentially one of ATI's high-end discrete graphics chips that has been tricked out with more memory and double-precision floating point units, which apparently is better than single precision. It comes with 2GBs of memory, compared with 512MBs of memory on the most powerful ATI graphics chip.
But the programming is still a little tricky. You'll need a software developer's kit, and you'll probably only want to port limited amounts of your code to run on the 9170.
"You don't have a researcher that's trying to port over thousands of lines of legacy code. They have a particular algorithm that (the researcher) knows will run well on a GPU," said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing for AMD. "You're not worried about changing code for something that gives you an order of magnitude increase (in performance)," she said.
The 9170 isn't going to be out until the first quarter of next year, as AMD's graphics priorities for the holiday season are discrete graphics chips for PCs that all of us can use. It will cost $1,999, which might seem like a lot, but this is something you should be able to add into an existing workstation or server for a performance boost when you need it, rather than buying a fancy server for just a few lines of code.
Eventually, AMD wants to integrate this type of technology directly onto a PC or server processor. It has already announced plans to integrate graphics chips onto PC chips as part of its Fusion project, but it hasn't identified a timeframe for putting its powerful stream computing technology on a PC chip.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
NVIDIA is in the winning seat, even after this announcement.
- Isn't it about time?
- by sumwatt November 8, 2007 9:17 AM PST
- I've been amused for quite some time that the GPU companies have just begun promoting their processors for general processing purposes. GPU's have long outperformed the sub-level CPU in terms of raw calculation speed. However the problem is there is no one standard to develop on any platform. What I mean is that in general, I can't write an app and have it perform on the AMD/ATI platform then port it easily to NVidia's platform and even then port it to IBM's Cell processor. All rely on some form of proprietary parallelism as the underlying means of processing but you end up being bound to a specific platform. This may not be a huge issue if we're talking about complex, custom applications that are developed and need the raw power through very specific customizations. You actually probably want to extract every advantage you can from the processor. However if we ever want to take the super-computer to the desktop in the form of a common, every-day user platform, it may become quite tricky.
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(3 Comments)I will say this much though - should these parallel processors gain enough traction and become practical for every day computing, Intel may be hurting down the road and AMD's purchase of ATI looks all the sweeter. I'm sure Intel is going to be next to announce a "stream" processor although depending on the markets, it may be too little, too late.