AMD Breaks Teraflop Barrier

March 5, 2007: Hot on Intel’s heels, AMD is showing off its own single-system computing platform that breaks the teraflop processing barrier, as well as a new integrated graphics chipset born of its recent acquisition of ATI.

Showcasing its new baby at a press conference in San Francisco, AMD’s “Teraflop in a Box” consisted of an Opteron dual-core processor combined with two of its next-gen R600 Stream Processors capable of churning out over one trillion floating-point calculations per second.

The company says this represents a ten-fold performance increase on today’s top server platforms, which deliver around 100 billion calculations per second.

"The technology AMD demonstrated today is just one example of how the 'New' AMD is changing the game for our industry," said Dave Orton, executive vice president of visual media business at AMD. "Today, teraflop computing capability is largely reserved for the supercomputing space. But now that 'Teraflop-in-a-Box' is a reality, AMD can deliver an order of magnitude increase in performance."

AMD says that platforms based on this new technology could benefit a wide range of scientific and commercial applications, including energy, financial, environmental, medical, scientific, defence and security organisations by delivering them the computing power required to conduct intensive tasks and searches significantly faster than previously possible.

At the same event in San Francisco AMD also unveiled its first integrated graphics chipset from ATI. The new 690 chipset for Athlon 64 processors will be the company’s first integrated offering to come from the company’s recent high-profile US$5.4 billion takeover of ATI.

The AMD 690 will incorporate the ATI Radeon X1250 graphics processor, giving it the ability to handle demanding graphical tasks according to the company.

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