ATI has for weeks been giving us hints about a new thing the company has been working on and now that it has officially launched stream computing it is simply about using the power of the graphics circuits for, perhaps, a bit unorthodox purposes. About a year ago we were in Spain and listened to ATI’s presentation of GPGPU during the launch of ATI’s R520 circuit. What we then found out was that ATI was working together with, among others, Stanford University to use the enormous floating point performance of the graphics circuits for other things than 3D rendering and computer games. General Purpose GPU was the name of the concept and it has now continued developing its initial thoughts with more generic areas of use also with graphics circuits.
The cooperation with Stanford University has continued and we’ve already received information about a test version of its Folding@Home project coming for ATI’s graphics circuits. The first beta version of this software will be launched today, but so far there is only support for ATI’s Radeon X19xx series. Letting ATI’s graphics circuits perform folding calculations has proven to be a stroke of genious and according to ATI it will result in a performance up to 40 times that of a traditional CPU. In pure time this means that you could shorten 3 years of reseaarch to 1 month, nothing but astonishing.
“The processing power of just 5,000 ATI processors is also enough to rival that of the existing 200,000 computers currently involved in the Folding@home project; and it is estimated that if a mere 10,000 computers were to each use an ATI processor to conduct folding research, that the Folding@home program would effectively perform faster than the fastest supercomputer in existence today, surpassing the 1 petaFLOP level.”
More information about ATI and Folding@Home can be found in ATI’s press release and Stanford’s website.
Stream Computing isn’t just about handling advanced calculations for medical research, but ATI has drawn a picture of several interesting areas for where its GPGPU intiative could be used. Everything from database searches to finansial surveys can be performed many times faster than with regular PC processors.
Another thing that Stream Computing is perfect for is calculating physics, which ATI has earlier released information about. Instead of developing a unique processor for physics acceleration with computer games, like PhysX from AGEIA, ATI is instead working on letting a regular GPU handle this.
“Videogames – An area where ATI processors are already heavily used for graphics purposes, working with Havok, premier provider of software and services to interactive digital media creators, stream computing is resulting in life-like modeling of hair, cloth, smoke, liquid, and the physics behind them, giving gamers the most immersive experience possible.”
We’re absolutely certain we will hear more about ATI and its Stream Computing soon and those who wants to know more about ATI’s new initiative can check out its two press releases, one and two. At Anandtech they’ve also published an article about how ATI’s graphics circuits work with, among others, Folding@Home.
