The FireStream line is a series of add-on expansion cards released from 2006 to 2010, based on standard Radeon GPUs but designed to serve as a general-purpose co-processor, rather than rendering and outputting 3D graphics.
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.
[3] 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.
[4] 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.
The Northern and Southern Islands generations were skipped, and in 2012, AMD announced that the new FirePro W (workstation) and S (server) series based on the new Graphics Core Next architecture would take the place of FireStream cards.
The FireStream was claimed to be 20 times faster in typical applications than regular CPUs after running PeakStream's software [citation needed].
According to an AMD-demonstrated system[20] with two dual-core AMD Opteron processors and two Radeon R600 GPU cores running on Microsoft Windows XP Professional, 1 teraflop (TFLOP) can be achieved by a universal multiply-add (MADD) calculation.