AMD launches its new FirePro cards

One of the key notes from the “AMD vs Nvidia” battle on the newest 28nm graphics cards was that although Nvidia’s GPUs were generally faster and better optimised in gaming, AMD’s cards packed a huge amount of compute power. Something that is not so good for gamers, but ideal for professional applications that rely on compute power.

That bodes well for AMD’s new FirePro line up, which includes:

• W9000 6GB, $3999, 4 TFLOPs single precision (SP) and 1 TFLOPs double precision (DP)
• W8000 4GB, $1599, 3.23 TFLOPs SP and 0.86 TFLOPs DP
• W7000 4GB, $899, 2.4 TFLOPs SP and 0.15 TFLOPs DP
• W5000 2GB, $599, 1.27 TFLOPs SP and 0.08 TFLOPs DP

AMD’s FirePro cards now pack substantially more compute power than Nvidia cards at the same price point, by a significant margin – although Nvidia’s Quadro series still dominates the market. The W9000, W8000 and W7000 can all drive up to six 30″ displays at ultra-high 4096×2160 resolutions.

AMD is boasting the W9000 possesses a record shattering 1.95 billon triangles per second – which is 1.5 times as great as the competitor’s most powerful workstation graphics card. In addition to having up to 83% greater memory bandwidth as well, allowing for more responsiveness.

All the new FirePro cards will also support PCI Express Generation 3, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore, to give efficient power management where it is most needed – in a cost-sensitive business environment. Now the market awaits Nvidia’s 28nm Quadro response.

Source: Press Release