I think it’s interesting when companies embrace changes in their industry rather than ignoring it or trying to litigate it out of existence (I’m thinking of an organization, and its initials are RIAA).
AMD is doing just that by opening up it’s HyperTransport interconnect for other vendors to bolt hardware on to AMD’s product offering. Think FPGAs, co-processors, and the like. The initiative (which is not new) is called Torrenza, and you can find out more here.
AMD lists Cray, IBM, and Sun as its main OEM partners, along with a bunch of “ecosystem” partners: companies like Xilinx and QLogic.
[…] You add the Stream Processor in an existing system via PCI Express along with up to a gigabyte of memory. Oddly, it doesn’t connect via the Torrenza interface. The chip on the board has 48 cores, and ATM claims it can deliver 375 GFLOPS. […]