Advanced Micro Devices announced a high-end chipset which uses technology commonly found in graphics processors, called parallelism, to enhance performance. AMD, which bought ATI last year, is apparently using technology it got from the video card maker. The technology, first developed by ATI, is called by AMD Stream Computing. The processor board includes 2 Gbytes of GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM.

"People want interaction in games to be more realistic, so a lot of the underlying physics turns out to be similar to what you want to do with real-world simulation," said Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer.

"It's a very good opportunity to exploit the power and price performance advantage the GPU (graphics processing unit) gives you," Hester said.

The chipset, called FireStream 9170, is designed for high performance computers (HPCs) like those used by scientists for climate research and oil exploration, and by financial analysts for advanced number crunching. It will be priced at S$1,999. The chipset draws 150 Watts and offers up to 500 gigaflops of computing power, according to AMD, or about 100 times the performance of one of its dual core Opterons. Boasting 660 million transistors and 320 processing units, the 55-nm chips will be made by Taiwanese contract chipmaker TSMC.

Running software on the FireStream 9170 will require special adaptations. However, the chipset can also be added to an existing server or workstation with a PCI Express 2.0 x16 interface. Standalone configurations will also be possible.

In September AMD launched its Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, which has four processor cores on a silicon chip that also includes a memory controller hub and high-speed HyperTransport links. During the same month AMD announced AMD Phenom triple-core processors, the world’s first PC processors to integrate three computational cores on a single die of silicon, will be available in Q1 2008.

Advanced Micro Devices, founded in 1969, is the world's second-largest supplier of x86 based processors and the world's third largest supplier of graphics cards and GPUs, after taking control over ATI in 2006.