AMD's new Firestream chip tops 1 teraflop

(reghardware) -- The latest round of graphics card dueling between AMD and Nvidia isn't just over high-end gamers. The vendors will also exchange blows for the hearts and wallets of your friendly neighborhood medical imagers, seismic modelers, and computational fluid dynamisists.

AMD is refreshing the FireStream processor line with a new general purpose GPU (GPGPU) that boasts more than one teraflop of processing power.

Instead of handling gaming or graphics operatins, GPGPUs are built to crunch hundreds of parallel calculations per clock cycle. They promise massive speed improvements over a CPU in mathematical workloads of the scientific, educational and high performance computing variety.

AMD claims developers are reporting up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes as compared to using a CPU alone.

AMD's new card succeeds the FireStream 9170, released last November and capable of 500 gigaflops for single precision performance. The FireStream 9250 is capable of 1 teraflop for single precision calculations, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second.

Nvidia is similarly rolling out its 240-core Tesla-10 Series GPGPU chip that's also capable of 1 Teraflop of computational muscle.