Sapphire, the single largest add-in board partner for AMD, announced its FireStream 9270 GPGPU accelerator. Devices of this class exploit the general purpose computing capabilities of graphics processors, back them with a software architecture, and a programming environment to make for a dedicated number-crunching machine that holds rated computational power much higher than that of CPUs. Product lines in this class includes the AMD FireStream, that finds competition in NVIDIA's Tesla.

The appearance of the FireStream 9270 suggests it has been derived from the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator, albeit different clock speeds, different drivers, four times the amount of memory, and connections. The core features 800 stream cores that churn out peak computational power of 1.2 TFLOPs (single precision floating-point) and 240 GFLOPs (double precision floating-point). The floating point format is in adherence to IEEE standards. It features 2 GB of GDDR5 memory running at 850 MHz, with a peak bandwidth of 108.8 GB/s. The FireStream 9270 is backed by AMD's Stream 1.3 SDK that can be currently downloaded for free. It supports OpenCL in Microsoft Windows and Linux environments. The accelerator will be released by Sapphire towards the end of February, at a price of $1499. Additionally, AMD is teaming up with server-builder Aprius to release a 4U rack chassis system that holds as many as eight FireStream 9270 accelerators that churn out a theoretical max computational power of 9.6 TFLOPs.