firestream

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 SC07 supercomputing show, and executives spoke this week about the promise of "stream computing." The 9170 is designed to let high-performance computing applications take advantage of the excellent parallel performance of a graphics chip.

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 … Read more