AMD announces FirePro W9100 32GB graphics card

April 15, 2016 | 13:06

Tags: #32gb #firepro #firepro-w9100 #gddr5 #quadro #quadro-m6000 #video-ram #vram

Companies: #amd #nvidia

AMD has one-upped its graphics rival Nvidia with the announcement of a new model of FirePro W9100 graphics card, a workstation-class device boasting a whopping 32GB of video memory.

Nvidia made much of its Quadro M6000 24GB when it unveiled the card in March this year, boasting that its doubled graphics memory had led to anything up to a ten-fold performance boost for customers including the Nissan Motor Company to Sony Pictures Imageworks. Now, though, AMD has answered the competition with the FirePro W9100 32GB, a workstation card that backs a ridiculous 32GB of video memory for a single GPU.

'With the new AMD FirePro W9100 32 GB, AMD is unleashing the world's largest memory size professional workstation graphics card,' crowed Raja Koduri, senior vice-president and chief architect, of the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) at AMD. 'Along with exceptional hardware, AMD is also delivering software tools to leverage our high bandwidth and large memory GPU configurations effectively.' AMD's previous 32GB board, the FirePro S9170, is excluded from the title of 'workstation graphics card' as it was an accelerator board designed for servers and high-performance computing (HPC) products, lacking any form of video output of its own.

Unveiled during the National Association of Broadcasters Show this week, the FirePro W9100 is aimed at a range of disciplines: the company has run demonstrations including VR content creation and consumption, computer aided engineering and design, visualisation, and industrial uses. Like Nvidia, however, it has opted not to develop a brand-new card: the FirePro W9100 32GB is simply a version of the existing FirePro W9100 with double the VRAM. As a result, its specifications remain unchanged: a single GPU offer 2,816 stream processors across 44 compute units and 5.24 teraflops of peak single-precision and 2.62 teraflops of peak dual-precision floating point compute performance - lower, crucially, than Nvidia' rival Quadro M6000, leaving buyers choosing between higher peak performance or an additional 8GB of graphics memory.

Pricing for the 32GB FirePro W9100, which is due to launch in the second quarter of this year, has yet to be confirmed.
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