AMD has been talking about CPU and GPU 'fusion' for many months now as they believe using both a processor and a graphics card is the way of the future. Today that reality has come one step closer with the announcement of a new technology brand called ATI Stream. Read on to see what ATO Stream Technology is all about and what Radeon HD 4000 series owners will be getting for free.
If I can use Avivo to convert my DVDs to H.264 encoded MP4s to stream over iTunes then I'll be happy. This is a step in the right direction at utilizing all those stream processors. The only way this would get better would be when Larrabee launches with it's hundreds of X86 cores
Awesome! It's about time AMD had a CUDA alternative released ^_^
Also nice of them to go one step further than Nvidia and give away the video converter for free, I'll be sure to give that a whirl at some point (no doubt it will come in really handy when my Pandora arrives and i want to watch some video on it).
Does the fact that they have been partnering with adobe mean that CS4 support will be there when they release the stream enabled drivers?
nope and to be honest I think AMD will eventually have more stream applications available as they are all open source and mainly using DirectX and and OpenCL DirectX Compute Shaders...
When companies have to spend money to port their applications over to enable streaming they won't be doing it for both standards, so in the end it must be either CUDA or a free open standard... Unless NVIDIA is going to pay companies to use CUDA (which they have thus far) it will will be interesting to see what happens in the next year.
With share prices of AMD at $2.30 for the low today and NVIDIA at $7.05 I can't see either being in a position to spend money for that in this economy.
Well, I'm happy about the Adobe integration, but it sucks that my 3850 is not supported. Could this be a way of forcing me to upgrade? Nahh....AMD/ATI wouldn't do that to us, right?
I am actually quite interested in seeing some benches on how this streaming process works on real conversion though.
Just a little puppy trying to make it in a big digital world.
Now ATI needs to kick F@H in the pants to fix their drivers to take advantage of 800 stream processors instead of 320.
Then I could get 5000ppd from an underclocked 4850.
This is great news from ATI. I really hope they can push the agenda forward so we can see improvements in all aspects of computing.
