AMD's FireStream card with R600 chip sports passive cooling

ATI WAS THE first GPU Company with a GP-GPU product on the market - codenamed FireStream, these cards were later renamed to AMD Stream Processor.

This was just a stop gap, since AMD is now coming to market with R600-based boards, some of which have shipped to partners inside AMD's Close-to-the-metal programme.

R600 FireStream sports quite a massive amount of on-board memory, and is geared for installation systems with internal airflow setup

A first look at AMD's card shows the huge plastic block is covering the heatpipe cooling from the original HD2900XT card, with no fans or plastic different casing. Bear in mind that this design is oriented towards being in a rack chassis, so the only goal of design is to have as much heatsink exposure to the stream of air coming from fans mounted in front of the card.

Stream Computing is getting big and it will be interesting to see Nvidia's high-end NV55 and other parts sporting double precision units, but without full support for IEEE 754 formats. It will be also very interesting to see what kind of units will be inside R700, R800, R900 and R1K.

We're not kidding here, these are all projects in various stages of development inside ATI, with first three architectures being closed, and the development of R1K specs is in progress.

Still think AMD will stop developing discrete GPUs? If you believe that, you're probably on something. µ