AMD’s newly-announced FireStream technology was announced earlier today and is being touted as the first of its kind to contain a double-precision floating point. The technology is based on ATI’s Radeon graphics card line and the new chips will cost $2000 a pop.
The floating point, as you’ll remember from gradeschool, “is a numerical-representation system in which a string of digits (or bits) represents a real number,” according to Wikipedia. In plain English, this new chip is “modified to crunch huge amounts of data, with potential customers in financial, engineering, and scientific industries.”
Hmmm…Doesn’t GPU stand for Graphical Processing Unit – e.g. specifically for processing game/image related data? Seems like it needs a new name…Unless I’m thinking of something else.