Following the release of the
Radeon R520 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) to create GPGPU products — able to calculate general purpose mathematical formulas in a massively parallel way — to process heavy calculations traditionally done on
CPUs and specialized floating-point math
co-processors. 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
Close to Metal 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 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 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 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
OpenCL. 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. FireStream was succeeded by the
FirePro product line, based on the
Graphics Core Next microarchitecture. ==Models==