AMD has announced its latest workstation-oriented graphics board, the FirePro W9100, which packs an impressive 16GB of GDDR5 memory - nearly three times that of its predecessor the FirePro W9000.
The AMD FirePro W9100 is based around a 28nm implementation of the Graphics Core Next 1.1 'Hawaii' architecture, an upgrade from the GCN 1.0 'Tahiti' of its predecessor. Although full specifications aren't due to be announced until early next month, the company has confirmed an increase from 2,048 stream processors to 2,816 and from 128 texture units to 176. The result: five teraflops of single-precision compute performance, or 2.67 teraflops of double-precision.
Now, to put that into perspective, Nvidia's latest GeForce GTX Titan Z board offers eight teraflops of single-precision performance, but requires two GPUs in which to do it - and each GPU has access to only 6GB of the shared 12GB GDDR5 memory. The FirePro W9100, on the other hand, has only a single GPU which has the entire 16GB to itself - and, the company has confirmed, the boards will support stacking of up to four cards via CrossFire for systems that require higher performance.
The board, AMD explained during its press conference, is designed for those working on ultra-high resolution projects. As well as the increasingly popular UHD and 4K resolutions, the company has claimed to be seeing demand from markets looking to work with resolutions as high as 8K - which needs a significantly larger framebuffer than the company's previous FirePro W9000 6GB could offer.
Official pricing for the FirePro W9100 has yet to be confirmed, but those interested in getting their hands on one - or four - can expect to dig deep: as professional products the FirePros demand a hefty pricetag, the FirePro W9000 launched in August 2012 at $4,000 and the W9100 should easily smash that figure when it formally launches on the 7th of April.
The AMD FirePro W9100 is based around a 28nm implementation of the Graphics Core Next 1.1 'Hawaii' architecture, an upgrade from the GCN 1.0 'Tahiti' of its predecessor. Although full specifications aren't due to be announced until early next month, the company has confirmed an increase from 2,048 stream processors to 2,816 and from 128 texture units to 176. The result: five teraflops of single-precision compute performance, or 2.67 teraflops of double-precision.
Now, to put that into perspective, Nvidia's latest GeForce GTX Titan Z board offers eight teraflops of single-precision performance, but requires two GPUs in which to do it - and each GPU has access to only 6GB of the shared 12GB GDDR5 memory. The FirePro W9100, on the other hand, has only a single GPU which has the entire 16GB to itself - and, the company has confirmed, the boards will support stacking of up to four cards via CrossFire for systems that require higher performance.
The board, AMD explained during its press conference, is designed for those working on ultra-high resolution projects. As well as the increasingly popular UHD and 4K resolutions, the company has claimed to be seeing demand from markets looking to work with resolutions as high as 8K - which needs a significantly larger framebuffer than the company's previous FirePro W9000 6GB could offer.
Official pricing for the FirePro W9100 has yet to be confirmed, but those interested in getting their hands on one - or four - can expect to dig deep: as professional products the FirePros demand a hefty pricetag, the FirePro W9000 launched in August 2012 at $4,000 and the W9100 should easily smash that figure when it formally launches on the 7th of April.
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