AMD FireStream was AMD's brand name for their Radeon-based product line targeting stream processing and/or GPGPU in supercomputers. Originally developed by ATI Technologies around the Radeon X1900 XTX in 2006, the product line was previously branded as both ATI FireSTREAM and AMD Stream Processor. The AMD FireStream can also be used as a floating-point co-processor for offloading CPU calculations, which is part of the Torrenza initiative. The FireStream line has been discontinued since 2012, when GPGPU workloads were entirely folded into the AMD FirePro line. Overview 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. Like the FireGL/FirePro line, they were given more memory and memory bandwidth, but the FireStream cards do not necessarily have video output ports. All support 32-bit single-precision floating point, and all but the first release support 64-bit double-precision. The line was partnered with new APIs to provide higher performance than existing OpenGL and Direct3D shader APIs could provide, beginning with Close to Metal, followed by OpenCL and the Stream Computing SDK, and eventually integrated into the APP SDK. For highly parallel floating point math workloads, the cards can speed up large computations by more than 10 times; Folding@Home, the earliest and one of the most visible users of the GPGPU, obtained 20-40 times the CPU performance. Each pixel and vertex shader, or unified shader in later models, can perform arbitrary floating-point calculations. History 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. The interest led ATI (and Nvidia) to create GPGPU products — able to calculate general purpose mathematical formulas in a massively parallel way — to process heavy calculations traditionally done on CPUs and specialized floating-point math co-processors. GPGPUs were projected to have immediate performance gains of a factor of 10 or more, over compared to contemporary multi-socket CPU-only calculation. With the development of the high-performance X1900 XFX nearly finished, ATI based its first Stream Processor design on it, announcing it as the upcoming ATI FireSTREAM together with the new Close to Metal API at SIGGRAPH 2006. The core itself was mostly unchanged, except for doubling the onboard memory and bandwidth, similar to the