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The FireStream range uses the same cores as the ATI Radeon consumer cards, but is intended for applications that use the GPU for mathematical calculations rather than graphical rendering. AMD claims that offloading certain operations onto the GPU can deliver a 2,000% speed increase over a mainstream CPU.

The major target markets are educational, medical and financial institutions that write their own applications, and the card is supplied with a full SDK.

The new card uses the same RV770 core found in the company's new Radeon HD 4000 range, and is architecturally very similar to the Radeon HD 4850 we looked at last week<

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. The major difference is the FireStream's 1GB of GDDR3, twice the HD 4850's allocation.

Otherwise, the 9250 shares the 4850's single-slot design, and promises the same sub-150W power consumption while delivering a teraflop of power with single precision calculations (falling to around 200 gigaflops for double-precision).

The FireStream 9250 even includes the 4850's 40 texture units - a feature which Patricia Harrell, Director of AMD Stream Computing, admitted at the launch event was "unlikely to be used" by most customers.

But one huge deviation from the ATI consumer range is the price. AMD's suggested retail price of $999 for the FireStream 9250 may be half the price of its predecessor, the RV670-based FireStream 9170, but it's still a huge premium for a card that is, on paper, almost identical to the Radeon HD 4850.

Part of that pays for a higher level of customer support, as you'd expect from a card that's intended for use with bespoke applications. But AMD assures us that FireStream cards are also manufactured to higher engineering standards than its Radeon series, enabling the cards to run "flat out, 24/7, with a three-year warranty."