It was in August that those good looking chaps over at Beyond3D spotted that ATI seemed to be working on dedicated GPGPU products. Now those products make an appearance, as part of AMD's processor line-up.
Yesterday AMD announced its Stream Processors. They're aimed at high performance computing scenarios, enabling boffins and other data crunchers to perform certain tasks quicker than on a regular CPU architecture.
The Stream Processors are essentially ATI graphics products, but without graphics output. The GPU is still there, as is the memory and PCIe connection, but the product is used for processing data that won't be output over a video interface.
Current Stream Processors appear to be R580 based, making them brethren to the X1900. The use of GDDR3 rather than GDDR4 backs this up, as does the data B3D dug up in August.
Judging by the press release, there'll be no ATI branding on the Stream Processors, and reports elsewhere on the web suggest it's just graphics boards that'll keep the ATI brand.
In other news, AMD's also announced a new interface for making use of its new Stream Processors, apparently increasing performance "as much as eightfold more than traditional 3D application programming interfaces (APIs)". The company has also opened up a new research center for Hypertransport. Big week for AMD on the enterprise computing front, then.
