The FLOPS (FLoating point Operations Per Second) race is usually the domain of the supercomputers. It is the most important metric used for ranking the TOP 500 supercomputers in the world. This however has been changing a lot in the recent years with new disruptive technologies such as Cell processors, FPGA acceleration cores, GPU computing, etc. These new technologies provide very high amount of processing speed for a very cheap price.

AMD released a new Stream Processor named FireStream 9250 which breaks the 1 Teraflop barrier. This achievement is for the single-precision (SP) floating point implementation whereas it achieves 200 GFlops of double-precision (DP) floating point implementation. It provides these processing speeds with only a power consumption of 150 watts and occupies one PCI slot. It is mainly used as an accelerating core for scientific and mathematics applications. In comparison, Cell processor, which is used in the Playstation 3 gaming system, delivers a peak performance of 218 GFlops (SP) and nVidia Tesla C870 model delivers 518.4 GFlops (SP). AMD also provides a Stream SDK to encourage developers to create applications. The price for one of these units is $999 MSRP.

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