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MillimeterProducts: AMD
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
FireGL cards return
AMD has struggled over the past year with production and marketing snafus, and some worried that the well-regarded ATI FireGL series cards (AMD bought the Canadian company last year) would be in trouble.
No need to worry, it seems. At the show, AMD announced five new ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators, ranging from the $299 ATI FireGL V3600 to the first card to support 2GB of RAM, the top-of-the-line $2,799 ATI FireGL V8650.
All of the new graphics boards are based on the next-generation ATI GPU, which incorporates a unified shader architecture featuring up to 320 individual stream processing units. (Stream processing—such as deployed in the Cell processor—enables highly efficient parallel processing, which can deliver several orders of magnitude higher performance over a conventional CPU.)
The new boards accelerate DirectX 10- and OpenGL 2.1-based pro apps more than 300 percent as compared to the previous-generation product. Unique aspects of the FireGL series include support for dual-monitor, 10-bit video, says product manager Rob Jamison, who also mentioned that the ATI division isn't AMD-centric, but it will be fully supporting Intel-based workstations, along with a new Linux initiative. www.amd.com
