Techo Rama

AMD has launched the world’s first stream processor. In fact the processor is nothing but a slightly modified GPU, the R580. BlueGene, which is the fastest supercomputer on this planet, uses 131,072 cores and can reach a performance of 367 TFlops. AMD challenging this supercomputer said that the same performance could be achieved with around 1000 R580 GPUs, which provide a performance of 375 GFlops each. The stream processor is based on the 384-million-transistor R580 graphics core. The concept of stream computing is based on the idea of developing massively parallel processors like the R580, which addresses 48 cores. It has been only a few years when the software developers discovered that a GPU could also be used to process other data especially in environments involving many calculations. The stream processor board is equipped with 1GB of GDDR3 memory that has a modified controller to enable stream computing applications. The accelerator still integrates a PCI interface, which may change to a HT interface in future. The modifications on the GPU are expensive, as AMD will charge $2600 for the board. The key to use the full computing power of such a processor will only depend on the applications that involve massive parallelism, and such a technology can improve the performance to up to eight times.