AMD FireStream
Hard Drive Recovery - AMD FireStream
The AMD FireStream is a stream processor developed by ATI technologies and subsequently AMD. This design aims at utilizing the stream processing/ General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) concepts for heavy floating-point computations such as High Performance Computing (HPC), scientific and financial applications. AMD FireStream also finds application as a floating-point co-processor for offloading CPU calculations.
AMD FireStream was announced on November 15, 2006 as the industry’s first commercially available hardware stream processing solution. Based on the ATI Radeon X1900 video card, the AMD Stream Processor is a specialized add-on card that implements the R580 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). However, it was designed for complex floating-point calculations common in scientific and financial applications. According to AMD, the processor had 8 times the floating-point performance over traditional graphics data processing.
The AMD Stream Processing lineup was an update to the latest GPU architecture (the Radeon R600). The architecture was manufactured on the same 80 nm fabrication process node as R580, with more parallel processors and stream processing units. The second generation, the AMD FireStream 9170, is based on the RV670 core and is constructed using a 55 nm fabrication process. The latest generation of products includes FireStream 9250 and 9270. The AMD FireStream 9250 is based on the RV770 core and is manufactured using 55 nm fabrication process. AMD FireStream 9270 also features the RV770 core but with a higher floating-point operation performance at 1.2 TFLOPS peak, 2 GB of GDDR5 memory and a dual-slot cooler.
