AMD FireStream 9350 and 9370 GPU compute co-processors double performance

The industry-leading Cypress GPUs (in the Radeon 5870 and new FirePro line) have made their way into AMD’s FireStream GPU co-processors. These “compute accelerators” are intended for highly parallel, compute-intensive workloads in scientific, financial and academic arenas.  Unlike the discrete FirePro/Radeon graphics cards, the FireStream compute accelerators use a passive heat sink so they can slide into rack mounted HPC servers and expansion systems for x64 systems.

From the press release: The AMD FireStream 9350 delivers 2.0 TFLOPS of single precision performance and 400 GFLOPS of double precision floating point performance in a single-slot, 150W solution with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, enabling breakthrough compute density (almost double the previous generation). The AMD FireStream 9370 delivers up to 2.64 TFLOPS of single precision performance and 528 GFLOPS of double-precision performance, and includes 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory, at a maximum board power of 225 watts. In addition, the AMD FireStream 9350 and 9370 both support leading industry standard application interfaces, including OpenCL, DirectX 11 and OpenGL.

The FireStream boards are AMD’s higher performance answer to Nvidia’s Tesla Fermi-based co-processors.  The higher floating-point performance aside, with the FireStream, AMD is also focused on delivering a solution based on open standards like OpenCL rather than the proprietary solutions like Cuda.