Editor’s Pick: AMD Unveils FirePro W9100 Graphics Card

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

When AMD recently launched its new AMD FirePro W9100 professional graphics card it became the flagship of its professional graphics boards. And it does sound pretty impressive. Here’s a quick look at what the AMD FirePro W9100 brings to the table for design and engineering professionals as well as video producers.

AMD describes the FirePro W9100 as engineered for next generation 4K (ultra high-resolution) workstations accelerated by the OpenCL (Open Computing Language). OpenCL is the parallel programming standard that can increase the performance of engineering and scientific applications.

The FirePro W9100 graphics card offers 16GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory, which AMD says is an industry first. It has a 512-bit memory interface and 320 GB/s bandwidth, providing more than 2.6 TFLOPS of double precision compute performance. Peak single-precision floating-point performance is reported to be 5.24 TFLOPS. All of which means that you should be able to do things like load entire datasets or large 4K files into internal memory and get great performance out of your simulations, renderings and similar compute-intensive applications.

You also get the ability to run up to six 4K displays simultaneously via its DisplayPort outputs. Resolution is up to 4160 x 2160 pixels. The card supports 10-bit color and low latency connectivity via DirectGMA to several third-party SDI Video I/O devices. Additionally, up to four AMD FirePro W9100 graphics cards can be used in a single system, which essentially means you can create a personal supercomputer. It supports Microsoft Windows 8.1, Windows 7 and Linux (32 and 64 bit).

The announcement was filled with testimonials from software developers including Adobe and CEI as well as hardware developers such as HP and Dell. FirePro cards are already certified for applications from outfits like Dassault and Siemens. The AMD FirePro W9100 has already been validated in accordance to HP’s Tested and Certified partner program for the HP Z820 and HP Z620 Workstations. A spokesman for Dell said that it’s looking forward to offering the card in its Dell Precision workstations later this year.

As part of the FirePro W9100 announcement, AMD released a reference design for what it calls the AMD Ultra Workstation. It makes for some interesting reading. You can find a link to it off today’s Pick of the Week write-up.

Speaking of links, at the end of the main write-up today, hit the link to the AMD FirePro W9100 landing page. It has all sorts of additional details, video testimonials and the like. Click on the grayed-out items on the right to step through the benchmarks.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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