AMD Puts Gaming Graphics Chip into High-Performance Computing Apps
 

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday announced that it would market ATI’s graphics processors for general-purpose computing applications under AMD Stream Processor brand-name. The company also unveiled special “Close to Metal” interface for efficient programming it’s the graphics chips that it now calls stream processors.

AMD’s first Stream Processor is basically ATI Radeon X1900 chip (code-named R580) installed onto a special print-circuit board. The chip has 48 of its pixel shader processors activated (each pixel shader processor of ATI R580 consists of two vector arithmetic logic units [ALUs], two scalar ALUs and a branch execution unit), operates at 600MHz, but comes with no vertex shader processors activated. The first Stream Processor board sports 1GB of GDDR3 memory at 1300MHz and is designed to fit into systems with PCI Express x16 slot.