ATI/AMD

Introduction
HPC Architecture
  1. Shared-memory SIMD machines
  2. Distributed-memory SIMD machines
  3. Shared-memory MIMD machines
  4. Distributed-memory MIMD machines
  5. ccNUMA machines
  6. Clusters
  7. Processors
    1. AMD Magny-Cours
    2. IBM POWER6
    3. IBM POWER7
    4. IBM PowerPC 970MP
    5. IBM BlueGene processors
    6. Intel Xeon
    7. The SPARC processors
  8. Accelerators
    1. GPU accelerators
      1. ATI/AMD
      2. nVIDIA
    2. General accelerators
      1. The IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor
      2. ClearSpeed/Petapath
    3. FPGA accelerators
      1. Convey
      2. Kuberre
      3. SRC
  9. Networks
    1. Infiniband
    2. InfiniPath
    3. Myrinet
Available systems
  • The Bull bullx system
  • The Cray XE6
  • The Cray XMT
  • The Cray XT5h
  • The Fujitsu FX1
  • The Hitachi SR16000
  • The IBM BlueGene/L&P
  • The IBM eServer p575
  • The IBM System Cluster 1350
  • The NEC SX-9
  • The SGI Altix UV series
    		•
    Systems disappeared from the list
    Systems under development
    Glossary
    Acknowledgments
    References

    In June 2010 the latest product from ATI (now wholly owned by AMD) was announced. It is the ATI Firestream 9370 card. As the actual delivery is scheduled by AMD in the third quarter of 2010 the information about the card is scant: There is not enough information available for a block diagram but we list some of the most important features of the processor:

     

    Table 2.1:Some specifications for the ATI/AMD Firestream 9270 GPU.
    Number of processors 1600
    Memory (GDDR5) 4 GB
    Clock Cycle 825 MHz
    Internal memory bandwidth ≤ 147.2 GB/s
    Peak Perfomance (32-bit) 2.64 Tflop/s
    Peak Perfomance (64-bit) 528 Gflop/s
    Power requirement (typical) ≤ 170 W
    Power requirement (peak) ≤ 225 W
    Interconnect (PCIe Gen2) 16×, 8 GB/s
    Error correction No
    Floating-point support Partial (32/64-bit)

    The specifications given indicate that per core 2 floating-point results per cycle can be generated, presumably the result of an add and a multiply operation. Whether these results can be produced independently or result from linked operations is not known because of the lack of information. Unlike in NVIDIA's Fermi card discussed below the Firestream 9370 does not support error correction yet. So, one has to be careful in assessing the outcomes of numerically unstable calculations.
    Like its direct competitor, NVIDIA, ATI offers a free Software Development Kit, SDK v.2.01 which supports OpenCL 1.1, Direct X11 and ComputeX. The earlier languages like BROOK+ and the very low level Close-To-Metal software development vehicles are no longer supported.