AMD’s launching “the world’s first Stream GPU with double-precision floating point technology,” the FireStream 9170, and the AMD FireStream SDK for Stream processors. Running a cool $2000, the 55nm chip pulls less than 150 watts of juice while pumping out 500 GFLOPS of computing power.

Also packed onboard is 2GB of GDDR3 memory, which, combo’d with asynchronous direct memory access, “ensures data can flow freely without interrupting the stream processor or CPU.” This parallel-processing piece of badassness will hit the market in the Q1 2008.