AMD’s newly-announced FireStream technology was announced earlier today and is being touted as the first of its kind to contain a double-precision floating point. The technology is based on ATI’s Radeon graphics card line and the new chips will cost $2000 a pop.
The floating point, as you’ll remember from gradeschool, “is a numerical-representation system in which a string of digits (or bits) represents a real number,” according to Wikipedia. In plain English, this new chip is “modified to crunch huge amounts of data, with potential customers in financial, engineering, and scientific industries.”