$US1,000 Firestream 9250 breaks teraflops barrier

AMD unveils a new way of looking at computing power.

AMD has announced the arrival of its next-generation stream processor, the Firestream 9250.

Introduced to the world at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, the processor was specifically designed to "accelerate critical algorithms in high performance computing" as well as mainstream and consumer applications.

Occupying a single PCI slot, the device breaks the one teraflops barrier for single precision performance and reportedly gives excellent performance per watt efficiency at up to eight gigaflops per watt.

The card allows users to pass critical workloads away from the main CPU and early developers have reported speed increases of up to 55 times whilst crunching financial data compared to using the CPU alone, apparently.

The stream processor, which features 1GB of GDDR3 memory, uses second-generation double-precision floating point hardware to deliver more than 200 gigaflops of number crunching power and it's compact size should see it used in small 1U servers as well as desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers.

AMD tells us it plans to deliver the Firestream 9250 and the supporting software developer kit in the third quarter of this year, at $US999.