Customers can leverage AMD’s latest FireStream offering to run critical workloads such as financial analysis or seismic processing dramatically faster than with CPU alone, helping them to address more complex problems and achieve faster results. For example, developers are reporting up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes as compared to processing on the CPU alone, which supports their efforts to make better and faster decisions. Additionally, the use of flexible GPU technology rather than custom accelerators assists those creating application-specific systems to enhance and maintain their solutions easily.

The AMD FireStream 9250 stream processor includes a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation delivering more than 200 gigaflops, building on the capabilities of the earlier AMD FireStream 9170, the industry’s first GP-GPU with double-precision floating point support. The AMD FireStream 9250′s compact size makes it ideal for small 1U servers as well as most desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers and it features 1GB of GDDR3 memory, enabling developers to handle large, complex problems.

Driving broad consumer adoption with open systems
AMD enables development of the FireStream family of processors with its AMD Stream SDK, designed to help developers create accelerated applications for AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL and ATI Radeon GPUs. AMD takes an open-systems approach to its stream computing development environment to ensure that developers can access and build on the tools at any level. AMD offers published interfaces for its high-level language API, intermediate language, and instruction set architecture; and the AMD Stream SDK’s Brook+ front-end is available as open source code.

In keeping with its open systems philosophy, AMD has also joined the Khronos Compute Working Group. This working group’s goals include developing industry standards for data parallel programming and working with proposed specifications like OpenCL. The OpenCL specification can help provide developers with an easy path to development across multiple platforms.

“An open industry standard programming specification will help drive broad-based support for stream computing technology in mainstream applications,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD. “We believe that OpenCL is a step in the right direction and we fully support this effort. AMD intends to ensure that the AMD Stream SDK rapidly evolves to comply with open industry standards as they emerge.”

Accelerating industry adoption
The growth of the stream computing market has accelerated over the past few years with Fortune 1000 companies, leading software developers and academic institutions utilizing stream technology to achieve tremendous performance gains across a variety of applications.

“Stream computing is increasingly important for mainstream and consumer applications and is no longer limited to just the academic or engineering industries. Today we are truly seeing a fundamental shift in emerging system architectures,” said Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research. “As the industry’s only provider of both high-performance discrete GPUs and x86-compatible CPUs, AMD is uniquely well-suited to developing these architectures.”

AMD customers, including ACCIT, Centre de Physique de Particules de Marseille, Neurala and Telanetix are using the AMD Stream SDK and current AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL or ATI Radeon boards to achieve dramatic performance gains on critical algorithms in HPC, workstation and consumer applications. Currently, Neurala reports that it is achieving 10-200x speedups over the CPU alone on biologically inspired neural models, applicable to finance, image processing and other applications.

AMD is also working closely with world class application and solution providers to ensure customers can achieve optimum performance results. Stream computing application and solution providers include CAPS entreprise, Mercury Computer Systems, RapidMind, RogueWave and VizExperts. Mercury Computer Systems provides high-performance computing systems and software designed for complex image, sensor, and signal processing applications. Its algorithm team reports that it has achieved 174 GFLOPS performance for large 1D complex single-precision floating point FFTs on the AMD FireStream 9250.

Pricing and availability
AMD plans to deliver the FireStream 9250 and the supporting SDK in Q3 2008 at an MSRP of $999 USD. AMD FireStream 9170, the industry’s first double-precision floating point stream processor, is currently available for purchase and is competitively priced at $1,999 USD. For more information about AMD FireStream 9250 or AMD FireStream 9170 or AMD’s complete line of stream computing solutions, please visit http://www.amd.com/stream.

Source: AMD

“AMD is committed to helping commercial customers who rely on 1P server and workstation solutions to take advantage of the same enterprise-class performance and energy-efficiency that power the largest global businesses,” said Patrick Patla, director, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “From entry-level servers and complex workstation environments to some of the largest supercomputers in the world, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors are designed to address the key customer priorities of performance, performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar.”

Enterprise-level Capabilities for 1P Solutions
The new Quad-Core AMD Opteron Models 1352 (2.1GHz), 1354 (2.2GHz), and 1356 (2.3GHz) processors are designed to empower small to mid-market customers to meet growing IT and budgetary demands and increase business productivity. With the enhanced computing capabilities of AMD’s native quad-core architecture in the same socket and thermal requirements as previous AMD Opteron 1000 Series processors, and industry-leading power management and virtualization innovations such as Enhanced AMD PowerNow! technology and Rapid Virtualization Indexing, Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors provide small and mid-size customers an energy-efficient yet powerful computing platform that can maximize IT resources and grow with their business demands.

“Customers looking to maximize application performance at an affordable price point can leverage the HP ProLiant ML115 G5 server and HP xw4550 workstation which are based on the AMD Opteron 1000 Series processors,” said Paul Gottsegen, vice president, marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “HP has the largest AMD Opteron-based server portfolio in the industry, and the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors increase the value provided by our server solutions.”

Customers have increasingly recognized the superior performance and efficiency benefits of the AMD Opteron processor in one-socket systems. Based on the 2008 first quarter numbers from IDC, the AMD Opteron processor now powers 14.3 percent of the one-socket x86 server systems worldwide. Additionally, AMD’s market share in one-socket x86 server systems in the U.S. has grown to 23.7 percent in the first quarter of 2008. This includes an average market share increase of 2.7 percent in the U.S. over the past three quarters.

“Dell understands that SMB customers require simplified computing solutions that do not sacrifice the performance or reliability needed to grow their businesses,” said Sally Stevens, director of PowerEdge Servers, Dell Product Group. “Dell’s PowerEdge T105 entry-level server combined with the price/performance capabilities of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processor enables us to deliver an economical and simple IT solution for small business owners.”

Scalability and Performance for High-Performance Computing
Built on AMD’s unmatched Direct Connect Architecture which helps eliminate the bottlenecks associated with front-side bus architectures, Quad-Core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processors deliver the world-class performance, scalability and overall system efficiency necessary to power one of the world’s largest high-performance computing (HPC) systems. By upgrading to the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, Oak Ridge National Laboratory more than doubled the compute performance of its Cray XT4 system, code-named ‘Jaguar,” to more than 260 teraflops to help advance scientific research.

“AMD’s industry-leading native multi-core architecture and Same Socket Technology help Cray deliver the world’s most scalable and upgradeable supercomputers, enabling our customers to tackle the most challenging scientific and engineering problems of our time,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “The collaboration between Cray and AMD continues to bring new levels of scalability and sustained performance to high performance computing, as shown by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s recent upgrade to its Cray XT4 system to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, which is one of the fastest and most efficient supercomputers in the world today.”

Source: AMD

“Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers deliver energy-efficiency even in the context of satisfying IBM’s most demanding high-performance computing solutions,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “Datacenter managers are increasingly seeking a balance of performance, energy-efficiency, and advanced virtualization functionality in order to optimize server resources amidst skyrocketing power, cooling and space costs. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is at the forefront of addressing this new real-world definition of datacenter performance.”

“IBM continues to deliver innovation and choice in the x86 market with today’s introduction of System x servers based on AMD’s new Quad-Core processors,” said James Northington, vice president, IBM System x. “The new System x3755 allows clients to grow the system along with their business, affordably scaling from the standard 2 socket system to 3 and 4 socket configurations while delivering industry leading price and performance.”

IBM has refreshed its current line of rack-mount AMD Opteron processor-based System x servers. These include the x3455 which is ideal for technical and financial applications, the x3655 for memory-intensive applications such as database, virtualization and dynamic web serving, and the x3755 that takes advantage of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture to speed scientific and technical computing through breakthrough performance with outstanding memory addressability in high performance computing (HPC) environments.

Source: AMD