Overview
Since the release of the past-generation Radeon R520 and GeForce G70 GPU cores, the programmable shaders architecture with large floating-point (FP) throughput has drawn more attention from academic and commercial interest groups, primarily for its ability to process data besides its original intended use of rendering visual effects. Due to the displayed interest, more resources were allocated towards developing GPGPU products — responsible for calculating general purpose mathematical formulas — to process heavy calculations which were previously running on mainstream servers, desktop Central Processing Units (CPU), and specialized floating-point math co-processors. GPGPUs were projected to have performance gains upwards of a factor of 10 when compared to CPU-only projections.
Similar GPGPUs appeared as early as the early 2000s. BionicFX was experimenting with processing audio data with a GeForce 6800 video card, announcing the Audio Video EXchange (AVEX) framework, with similar trials being performed by ATI at about the same time. Another example is the Folding@home distributed computing research program from Stanford University. This was the first piece of software to use the Radeon R580 GPU and other ATI GPU cores, equipped with a special beta version of the ATI Catalyst driver (version 6.5), to perform computations unrelated to graphics. Since May 2006, it has used the GPU cores to accelerate the simulation of protein folding in order to investigate protein-related diseases. At this time, the ATI FireStream was in its planning stages.
With the acquisition of ATI complete, AMD officially announced the reconstruction of branding and announced the AMD Stream Processor (originally the ATI FireStream) on November 15, 2006 as the industry's first commercially available hardware stream processing solution. Based on an 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 targeted at complex floating-point calculations used in scientific and financial fields instead of 3D graphics acceleration. AMD claimed that this processor had 8 times the floating-point performance over traditional graphics data processing.
In fact, ATI had put considerable effort into research and development (R&D) of a GPGPU product before their purchase by AMD, and announced the adoption of the stream processing/GPGPU concept in its line of GPU cores in 2006, codenamed Radeon R580.
The brand was further renamed to AMD FireStream with the second generation of stream processors (based on a 55 nm process), released on November 8, 2007. Future plans include the development of a stream processor on an MXM module, intended for embedded applications and next generation products in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Read more about this topic: AMD Fire Stream