Chip maker AMD has released its new FireStream 9250 which it claims is the first graphics chip to break the 1 Teraflop barrier.

The FireStream 9250 stream processor uses a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware method that can churn out 200 gigaflops, it says here. It follows on from the AMD FireStream 9170 which was the first GPU with double-precision floating point support.

Because the FireStream 9250 is small, it can be used in 1U servers as well as most desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers. It has 1GB of GDDR3 memory, and is expected to be in the shops in the third quarter of 2008 at around $999. It features a power consumption of 150 watts and occupies one PCI slot.

The target market is for scientific and mathematics applications where it is used as an accelerating core. Its rival, the Cell processor, which is used in the Playstation 3, can only manage a peak performance of 218 GFlops. X