AMD’s ATI division has today unveiled its FireStream 9250 card which includes the world’s first processor with a performance rating of over 1 Teraflop.
The exact performance figure is not known but is thought to be around 1.2 – 1.3 Teraflops given the word is that a 4x Crossfire X configuration could provide up to 5 Teraflops
AMD has clearly been hard at work recently, introducing its Puma / Turion Ultra CPU earlier this month and now unveiling this breakthrough.
The new graphics card features ATI’s new RV770 GPU which will be the foundation of new 4800-series graphics cards.
The FireStream 9250 manages to double the computing power of the current 9170 model but has a power consumption of just 170 watts – up from 150 watts.
The dual-GPU R700 card will achieve 2 Teraflops per board according to AMD.
The floating point performance metric is not yet a critical measurement in mainstream computing but if we compare the performance to earlier processors, the breakthrough is obvious. In 1996, it would have taken 6000 Pentium Pro processors to produce 1.2 Teraflops of performance.