Fancy having your PC's performance boosted into the 50 GFlops range? Well, Clearspeed is today demonstrating a new PCI Express product that promises to boost floating point performance to just that. The new add-in card will be available for desktop PCs and utilises a chip called CSX600 which Clearspeed claims is the world's fastest 64-bit floating point processor, delivering a sustained performance of 25 GFlops. Clearspeed's product will use two such chips, to deliver 50 GFlops.
What makes Clearspeed's card attractive is the fact that it can be installed in an existing computer within minutes and immediately can result in added performance for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Speed increases however are purely limited to floating point operations and mainly address traditional workstation environments - such as scientific applications in the biological or network simulation segment. According to Clearspeed, enthusiasts can also take advantage of the added performance, especially with professional audio and precision rendering software. Per card, such applications can gain about 5x to 10x in speed, the company said.