AMD has showcased a single-system Accelerated Computing platform claimed to break the teraflop computing barrier. At a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday , AMD demonstrated a “Teraflop in a Box” system running a standard version of Microsoft Windows XP Professional powered by AMD Opteron dual-core processor technology and two next-generation AMD R600 Stream Processors capable of performing more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second using a general “multiply-add” (MADD) calculation. This achievement represents a ten-fold performance increase over today’s high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second, according to AMD.
“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”, the Corporation says.
Platforms based on the same technology found in the “Teraflop-in-a-Box” demonstration should benefit a wide range of scientific and commercial applications, including energy, financial, environmental, medical, scientific, defense and security organizations around the world by equipping them with the intensive computing power they require to conduct research and deliver solutions significantly faster than previously possible.
The “flops” is an acronym meaning Floating Point Operations Per Second, a measure of a computer’s ability to perform floating point calculations. A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second. Stream processing technology helps raise the bar in this regard by leveraging sophisticated, massively parallel processors, generally used for 3D graphics applications, to solve real-world problems.
AMD’s presented platform is the response to Intel’s recent demonstration of CPU delivering Teraflop – or trillions of calculations per second – performance for future PCs and servers.
