AMD FireStream 9250
RV770 has been a run away success story for AMD, in form of a class leading performance product (4870X2) as well as offering a very good performance/price ratios (4850/4870). Now AMD brings the same price/performance approach to its stream computing class of products; the AMD FireStream 9250.
Based on the RV770 GPU; FireStream 9250 packs in 800 Shader processors coupled with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR3 memory. FireStream 9250 is available in a single-slot form factor compared to its older sibling the dual-slot 9170. The compact size of the 9250 should enable it to fit in 1U servers as well as most desktop workstations.
The power consumption for 9250 has also gone up (150W) compared to the 9170 (100W) but the efficiency (GFlops/Watt) is still improved by 60% thanks largely to the huge jump in computational horse power. In terms of double-precision floating point performance, the FireStream 9250 is the fastest processor in the world.
FireStream series of cards to catered towards delivering blistering performance of AMD's GPUs to business users in high performance computing situations such as financial analysis, seismic processing, simulations, rendering, climate research, protein folding etc.
MSRP of FireStream 9250 is $999, a great value compared to the 9170 which has half the computational horse power for twice the price. FireStream 9250 is scheduled to be available this month.
Stumble it!
So, the 4870X2 costs ~$560, and has 1600 processors, 2G GDDR5, and 2.4TFLOP performance, and this card has 800 processors 1G GDDR3, and goes for ~$1000. What am I missing?
@ A.Weiss
You missing driver for GPU. Software Engineering is the other half of computing.
I checked with AMD, the stream drivers are available for the 4870 as well. As far as I can tell, the only thing this card has that the 4870X2 doesn't is double precision. I don't need double precision for the work that I'm doing, it is all integral in fact. It would be nice if ATI would offer a firestream like card without the double precision and graphics stuff, and a lot more memory (accessible by all stream processors, from what I understand the 4870X2 individual cards cannot access each other's memory), also with more than 1600 stream processors.