AMD Shows Off FirePro W9000

From X-bit Labs: At its Fusion Developer Summit, Advanced Micro Devices unveiled its next-generation high-performance workstation graphics card called FirePro W9000. The new board will not only be based on Tahiti XT graphics processing unit (GPU), but will be powered by the improved 1GHz version of the chip.

AMD FirePro W9000 professional graphics card will be powered by Tahiti XT graphics processing unit with 2048 stream processors and 6GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory. The board has four DisplayPorts as well as 3-pin DIN stereo connector. The novelty will bring the power of AMD's graphics core next (GCN) architecture to the workstation market and will be the company's highest-performing workstation offering to date.

The FirePro W9000 will provide 4TFLOPS of single precision and 1TFLOPS of double precision compute precision, unlike the Radeon HD 7970 (also based on Tahiti XT), which offers 3.778TFLOPS of SP and 0.947TFLOPS of DP performance, respectively. The difference in compute performance points to higher clock-speed of the GPU on the professional graphics card. Keeping in mind the rumours about possible release of 1GHz versions of Tahiti XT and appropriate graphics cards on its base, it is likely that the new Tahiti XT will also power FirePro W9000 professional solution.

At present AMD is working hard to certify its FirePro W9000 workstation graphics card with leading professional graphics software vendors. Since such certification usually takes a long time, which is why the workstation version Tahiti XT will reach the market about eight to nine months later than the consumer Radeon HD 7970.

AMD promised to release FirePro W9000 officially at Siggraph 2012 conference that will take place in Los Angeles, California, in early August.

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