ATI developing stream computing systems

ATI Technologies Inc, Markham ON, has announced that it will be developing initiatives for enterprise stream computing using its proprietary graphics processors. ATI is teaming with PeakStream Inc, a new Redwood City CA-based software developer created to target the high performance computing (HPC) market. It is also working with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Sunnyvale CA, on a co-processing platform using a new ATI graphics chip and AMD's Opteron processor. AMD announced in July that it was acquiring ATI in a US$5.4-billion deal that concludes this month (R$, July 28/06). Stream computing has the potential to dramatically increase computing speed for a wide variety of applications by exploit ing the parallelism inherent in graphics hardware. ATI hopes to expand beyond the HPC into the energy, financial, defence and health applications. It is currently working with Stanford Univ to combine new software with ATI's processors to significantly reduce disease research times....