ATI FireSTREAM AMD Stream board revealed

FIRESTREAM BOARDS ARE hitting the world of research and development, but they're not flying under the ATI banner. Named "AMD Stream Processor", these babies pack a peak power of 375 GFLOPS, easily slaying any single CPU in the world today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.

As you can see in the picture above, the board is your typical ATI Radeon X1900 with the old and loud cooler, but now with AMD branding. We know that the colour of upcoming graphics products is still red, so perhaps AMD won't bring Graphzilla's colour to the PCB level. The board is only a rebranding of never released FireSTREAM boards, which were ready for launch in late September, but AMD wanted to do the rebranding thing first.

The "Stream Processor" comes running at a clockspeed similar to that used on X1900XT series of cards. The board packs 1GB of GDDR3 memory - 512MB located at the front and 512MB at the back of the PCB.

On two pictures below, you can see how the "ATI FireSTREAM Enterprise Stream Processor" originally looked:

We kindly thank GPUReview.com for the pictures

Since Nvidia already uses the term "Stream Processor" as a description for its scalar Shader units, we're tempted to suggest that AMD's marketing might have missed the boat.

We can now conclude that the acquisition is over and that the ATI brand is dead after all, as we wrote over three months ago.

AMD decided to do an Nvidia/3dfx and the case is closed. Regardless of what some AMD or ATI execs might be saying, the actions they took with their partners and employees of ATI speak for themselves.

We have heard that even the Radeon brand is in jeopardy, because some AMD folk are constantly downplaying the value of ATI and related brands. But we will be addressing this and disclosing all of the nitty and gritty next week. µ

L'INQ
FireSTREAM story at gpureview.com