This speedy chip almost makes me want Apple to switch to AMD. Today, the FireStream 9250 stream processor was announced with more than one teraflop of processing power. A teraflop! The chip fits in a single PCI slot, and only uses less than 150 watts of power. This speedy friend can deliver a rate of performance per watt, with up to eight gigaflops per watt. The Firestream 9250 is capable of a hundred parallel calculations per clock cycle, where most proccessers can only do a few. NetworkWorld points out that, “A gigaflop is 1 billion floating-point operations per second.” So, the 9250 tops 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second.
Hopefully, Apple will read this and upgrade the entire line of Macs, not that they need it, but how can they compete with a teraflop? The Firestream 9250 and the SDK for it will be seeded to developers in the third quarter of this year for an MSRP of $999.
Via [Network World] and [AMD Press Release]
You have no idea what a teraflop or even a flop means, do you?
Yes, I do know what it means.