AMD FireStream was AMD's brand name for their Radeon-based product line targeting

stream processing In computer science, stream processing (also known as event stream processing, data stream processing, or distributed stream processing) is a programming paradigm which views data streams, or sequences of events in time, as the central input and ou ...

and/or

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

in supercomputers. Originally developed by

ATI Technologies ATI Technologies Inc. (commonly called ATI) was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technology Inc., ...

around the Radeon X1900 XTX in 2006, the product line was previously branded as both ATI FireSTREAM and AMD Stream Processor. The AMD FireStream can also be used as a floating-point

co-processor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography ...

for offloading CPU calculations, which is part of the

Torrenza Torrenza was an initiative announced by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2006 to improve support for the integration of specialized coprocessors in systems based on AMD Opteron microprocessors. Torrenza does not refer to a specific product or specif ...

initiative. The FireStream line has been discontinued since 2012, when GPGPU workloads were entirely folded into the

AMD FirePro AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/ GP ...

line.

Overview

The FireStream line is a series of add-on

expansion card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus sl ...

s released from 2006 to 2010, based on standard Radeon GPUs but designed to serve as a general-purpose

, rather than rendering and outputting 3D graphics. Like the FireGL/FirePro line, they were given more memory and memory bandwidth, but the FireStream cards do not necessarily have video output ports. All support 32-bit

single-precision Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floatin ...

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can b ...

, and all but the first release support 64-bit double-precision. The line was partnered with new APIs to provide higher performance than existing OpenGL and Direct3D shader APIs could provide, beginning with

Close to Metal In computing, Close To Metal ("CTM" in short, originally called ''Close-to-the-Metal'') is the name of a beta version of a low-level programming interface developed by ATI, now the AMD Graphics Product Group, aimed at enabling GPGPU computing. CT ...

, followed by

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-progra ...

and the Stream Computing SDK, and eventually integrated into the APP SDK. For highly parallel floating point math workloads, the cards can speed up large computations by more than 10 times; Folding@Home, the earliest and one of the most visible users of the GPGPU, obtained 20-40 times the CPU performance. Each pixel and vertex shader, or unified shader in later models, can perform arbitrary floating-point calculations.

History

Following the release of the

Radeon R520 The R520 (codenamed Fudo) is a graphics processing unit (GPU) developed by ATI Technologies and produced by TSMC. It was the first GPU produced using a 90 nm photolithography process. The R520 is the foundation for a line of DirectX 9.0c a ...

and GeForce G70 GPU cores with programmable shaders, the large floating-point throughput drew attention from academic and commercial groups, experimenting with using then for non-graphics work. The interest led ATI (and

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

) to create GPGPU products — able to calculate general purpose mathematical formulas in a massively parallel way — to process heavy calculations traditionally done on

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

and specialized floating-point math

s. GPGPUs were projected to have immediate performance gains of a factor of 10 or more, over compared to contemporary multi-socket CPU-only calculation. With the development of the high-performance X1900 XFX nearly finished, ATI based its first Stream Processor design on it, announcing it as the upcoming ATI FireSTREAM together with the new

API at SIGGRAPH 2006. The core itself was mostly unchanged, except for doubling the onboard memory and bandwidth, similar to the FireGL V7350; new driver and software support made up most of the difference.

Folding@home Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a volunteer computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...

began using the X1900 for general computation, using a pre-release of version 6.5 of the ATI Catalyst driver, and reported 20-40x improvement in GPU over CPU. The first product was released in late 2006, rebranded as AMD Stream Processor after the merger with AMD. The brand became AMD FireStream with the second generation of stream processors in 2007, based on the RV650 chip with new unified shaders and double precision support. Asynchronous DMA also improved performance by allowing a larger memory pool without the CPU's help. One model was released, the 9170, for the initial price of $1999. Plans included the development of a stream processor on an MXM module by 2008, for laptop computing, but was never released. The third-generation quickly followed in 2008 with dramatic performance improvements from the RV770 core; the 9250 had nearly double the performance of the 9170, and became the first single-chip

teraflop In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

processor, despite dropping the price to under $1000. A faster sibling, the 9270, was released shortly after, for $1999. In 2010 the final generation of FireStreams came out, the 9350 and 9370 cards, based on the Cypress chip featured in the HD 5800. This generation again doubled the performance relative to the previous, to 2 teraflops in the 9350 and 2.6 teraflops in the 9370, and was the first built from the ground up for

. This generation was also the only one to feature fully passive cooling, and active cooling was unavailable. The Northern and Southern Islands generations were skipped, and in 2012, AMD announced that the new FirePro W (workstation) and S (server) series based on the new

Graphics Core Next Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was la ...

architecture would take the place of FireStream cards.

Models

* FireStream 9170 include Direct3D 10.1, OpenGL 3.3 and APP Stream * FireStream 92x0 include Direct3D 10.1, OpenGL 3.3 and

1.0 * FireStream 93x0 include Direct3D 11, OpenGL 4.3 and

1.2 with Last Driver updates

Software

The AMD FireStream was launched with a wide range of software platform support. One of the supporting firms was PeakStream (acquired by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

in June 2007), who was first to provide an open beta version of software to support CTM and AMD FireStream as well as

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

and

Cell Cell most often refers to: * Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life Cell may also refer to: Locations * Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...

(Cell Broadband Engine) processors. The FireStream was claimed to be 20 times faster in typical applications than regular CPUs after running PeakStream's software .

RapidMind RapidMind Inc. was a privately held company founded and headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, acquired by Intel in 2009. It provided a software product that aims to make it simpler for software developers to target multi-core processors an ...

also provided stream processing software that worked with ATI and NVIDIA, as well as Cell processors.

Software Development Kit

After abandoning their short-lived

API, AMD focused on

. AMD first released its Stream Computing SDK (v1.0), in December 2007 under the AMD

EULA An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user, generally made available to the customer via a retailer acting as an intermediary. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restr ...

, to be run on

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

.AMD APP SDK download page
an
Stream Computing SDK EULA
, retrieved December 29, 2007 The SDK includes "Brook+", an AMD hardware optimized version of the Brook language developed by Stanford University, itself a variant of the

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and th ...

(

C language C (''pronounced like the letter c'') is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities o ...

), open-sourced and optimized for stream computing. The AMD Core Math Library (ACML) and

AMD Performance Library Framewave (formerly AMD Performance Library (APL)) is computer software, a high-performance optimized programming library, consisting of low level application programming interfaces (APIs) for image processing, signal processing, JPEG, and vide ...

(APL) with optimizations for the AMD FireStream and the COBRA video library (further renamed as "Accelerated Video Transcoding" or AVT) for video transcoding acceleration will also be included. Another important part of the SDK, the Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL), is a software development layer aimed for low-level access, through the CTM hardware interface, to the GPU architecture for performance tuning software written in various high-level

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s. In August 2011, AMD released version 2.5 of the ATI APP Software Development Kit, which includes support for OpenCL 1.1, a parallel computing language developed by the

Khronos Group The Khronos Group, Inc. is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of 170 organizations developing, publishing and maintaining royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, parallel computation ...

. The concept of

compute shader In computing, a compute kernel is a routine compiled for high throughput accelerators (such as graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)), separate from but used by a main prog ...

s, officially called DirectCompute, in

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

's next generation API called

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

is already included in graphics drivers with DirectX 11 support.

AMD APP SDK

Benchmarks

According to an AMD-demonstrated system with two dual-core AMD

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sledg ...

processors and two Radeon R600 GPU cores running on

Windows XP Professional, 1

(TFLOP) can be achieved by a universal multiply-add (MADD) calculation. By comparison, an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 3.0 GHz processor at the time could achieve 48 GFLOPS. In a demonstration of Kaspersky SafeStream anti-virus scanning that had been optimized for AMD stream processors, was able to scan 21 times faster with the R670 based acceleration than with search running entirely on an Opteron, in 2007.

Limitations

* Recursive functions are not supported in Brook+ because all function calls are inlined at compile time. Using CAL, functions (recursive or otherwise) are supported to 32 levels.AMD Intermediate Language Reference Guide, August 2008 *Only bilinear texture filtering is supported;

mipmap In computer graphics, mipmaps (also MIP maps) or pyramids are pre-calculated, optimized sequences of images, each of which is a progressively lower resolution representation of the previous. The height and width of each image, or level, in the ...

ped textures and

anisotropic filtering In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces of computer graphics that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the ...

are not supported. *Functions cannot have a variable number of arguments. The same problem occurs for recursive functions. *Conversion of floating-point numbers to integers on GPUs is done differently than on x86 CPUs; it is not fully

IEEE-754 The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in ...

compliant. *Doing "global synchronization" on the GPU is not very efficient, which forces the GPU to divide the

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

and do synchronization on the CPU. Given the variable number of multiprocessors and other factors, there may not be a perfect solution to this problem. *The bus bandwidth and latency between the CPU and the GPU may become a

bottleneck Bottleneck literally refers to the narrowed portion (neck) of a bottle near its opening, which limit the rate of outflow, and may describe any object of a similar shape. The literal neck of a bottle was originally used to play what is now known as ...

References

External links

ATI Stream Technology FAQ

ATI Stream published papers and presentationsATI Stream SDKAnandTech article on distributed computingAMD Intermediate Language Reference Guide (CAL) v2.0 Feb '09
{{DEFAULTSORT:FireStream Advanced Micro Devices products ATI Technologies GPGPU