AMD’s High Performance Microprocessor

This is not a new name as last year AMD has announced to introduce its new graphical card under the banner “FireStream”. But the GUI was released with some other name. And now its back again, the brand is in with all its Fireworks. After the success of its First 64 bit processor and ATI Radeon H 2600, AMD is in and this time with a FireStream.






AMD has unveiled its fastest microprocessor yesterday. This is AMD FireStream 9170, which can perform 500 billion floating-point operations per second. This kind of high performance operations were earlier used in GUI processors where it was a parallel performance of graphical chip on your computer. I believe after taking over ATI last year, AMD has reviewed its GUI processors to produce this brand new fastest processor. This is more advanced than the processor of that of ATI. FireStream 9170 comes with 2GB GDDR3 memory when compared with 512MB in ATI graphical processor and the power consumption is less than 150 Watts. It also comes with a PCI Express 2.0 interface.Apart from this, AMD has also released its Software Development Kit which will enable developers to write related drivers for this processor.


This processor is expected to be in market from early next year at an estimated cost of $1,999. However the company is looking forward for a formal demonstration next week in SC07 supercomputing show. So looking into this innovative idea of AMD, other chip makers has also started entering the era of using GUI processors in mainstream computing apart from gamming and supercomputing operations. The best thing which I liked about this processor is that, AMD has given provision to edit the code to get more out of this processor. This is definitely a big go go for developers who are familiar with High Level Language. AMD is also rolling out a programming language named Brook+ which is a set of C extensions based on Stream Computing.


So in future we could see more and more processors built on Stream computing technology.


The Upcomming releases from AMD are Sapphires board, a brand new mother board under AM2+ technology. AMD has also unveiled the AM3 technology.