Stream is coming

Peter G. 14 Nov, 2008 at 11:19am ET Article published in Tech

The concept of a general purpose GPU gets people excited. After all, any time you can add more processing power to your computer it’s worthy of notice, but when the performance boost can potentially come without changing any of your hardware, you’ll grab the attention of an entire room. ATI is saying they’ll do just that.

ATI will push Stream to the public with the release of the Catalyst 8.12 drivers early next month, allowing idle video cards to assist your processor in a myriad of tasks ranging from video encoding to gaming to scientific calculations. The free update will work with 4000-series cards and all future ATI products, and potentially with some 3000-series cards too. The Inquirer says ATI’s solution is faster than NVIDIA’s CUDA and more appealing since it’s free. Sounds like a good deal to us.

Comments

14 Nov 2008 ~ 11:24am MiracleManS As someone looking at buying a new rig in the future, the idea of having extra power from my machine almost cements the use of an ATI card for me.
14 Nov 2008 ~ 11:28am Kwitko It's clear that AMD has taken the graphics crown back, the one it hasn't held so firmly since the Radeon 9xxx days. The open-sourcing of their drivers combined with this ices the cake. If I ever build a new rig there's no question which direction I'm going.
14 Nov 2008 ~ 1:23pm Garg Finally, a serious response to CUDA. I want to get into GPU development eventually, so this brings ATI cards back into consideration when I finally upgrade my aging desktop. Even after removing the copious Nvidia harshing from The Inq, this is a big win for ATI. Double bonus kudos for it being OpenCL based!
14 Nov 2008 ~ 2:31pm QCH The days of having dedicated processors (GPU or CPU) are coming to a close. Soon we will have generic processors that can do graphics, central processing, or even physics and systems with the capability to support hundreds of processors to do whatever the OS requires.... 10 years max.
14 Nov 2008 ~ 4:05pm SPIKE09 Old news posted this in your ati folding thread yesterday Buddy J :bigggrin:

http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79178
14 Nov 2008 ~ 4:22pm BuddyJ I saw the link yesterday and tried to get some feedback on it, but it wasn't until I read more up on it today that I felt good enough about it to write a news post. Thanks though for pointing me in the right direction.