AMD shows off Teraflop in a Box

AMD SHOWED OFF what it dubbed a "Teraflop in a Box" system to hacks in San Francisco today.

The single-system, Accelerated Computing computer runs Windows XP Professional on an AMD Opteron dual-core processor combined with two AMD R600 Stream processors.

The box is capable of performing more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second using a general "multiply-add" (MADD) calculation, the firm boasted.

It reckons the system is capable of a ten-fold performance increase over today's high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second.

Ex-ATI head honcho, Dave Orton, now executive vice president of visual media business at AMD reckons the "New" AMD is "changing the game for our industry." Teraflop computing capability is largely reserved for the supercomputing space, he said. "But now that Teraflop-in-a-Box” is a reality, AMD can deliver an order of magnitude increase in performance."

The firm reckons specialised co-processors interoperating with x86 microprocessors are the way forward, to provide "efficient and flexible acceleration for specific applications".

The chip maker reckons the technology will find a use in a wide range of scientific, medical, business, defence and security computing applications. The firm also added "consumer" in its little list. Consumer? Sheesh! µ