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AMD Banks On Flood of Stream Apps

Posted by timothy on from the streams-come-with-banks-anyhow dept.

Slatterz writes "Closely integrating GPU and CPU systems was one of the motivations for AMD's $5.4bn acquisition of ATI in 2006. Now AMD is looking to expand its Stream project, which uses graphics chip processing cores to perform computing tasks normally sent to the CPU, a process known as General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). By leveraging thousands of processing cores on a graphics card for general computing calculations, tasks such as scientific simulations or geographic modelling, which are traditionally the realm of supercomputers, can be performed on smaller, more affordable systems. AMD will release a new driver for its Radeon series on 10 December which will extend Stream capabilities to consumer cards." Reader Vigile adds: "While third-party consumer applications from CyberLink and ArcSoft are due in Q1 2009, in early December AMD will release a new Catalyst driver that opens up stream computing on all 4000-series parts and a new Avivo Video Converter application that promises to drastically increase transcoding speeds. AMD also has partnered with Aprius to build 8-GPU stream computing servers to compete with NVIDIA's Tesla brand."

5 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Useless without free drivers! by neonleonb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this'll be useless without open-source drivers, so you can actually make your fancy cluster use these vector-processing units.

    1. Re:Useless without free drivers! by Cassius+Corodes · · Score: 5, Funny

      We're not talking about video games here. Some people use computers for important work, not just for screwing around.

      How dare ye!

      --
      Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
    2. Re:Useless without free drivers! by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Any my point is, why? All you need is a decent API. Claiming it's useless without open source drivers is just a silly ruse by an open source zealot to advance an agenda.

      Open source has a lot of things going for it, but it's more fanatical followers are not among them.

    3. Re:Useless without free drivers! by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's fine to lobby for open source drivers. It's also great if you want to run something on your chosen platform and you want the company who makes the hardware to support that. Both of those I can wholeheartedly support.

      Claiming that something is useless without open source drivers is either dishonest or deluded. As I said, I don't think the important goals of the open source movement are served by either lying or ranting about your delusions.

  2. Re:The future of Computing is in... by waferhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You do realize this article has ~absolutely nothing to do with gaming, or even normal users, right?

    The systems discussed using CUDA or GPGPU will probably spend ~100% of their lives running flat out, doing simulations or such.

    Visualize a Beowulf Cluster of these. Really.