Displaying items by tag: FirePro

AMD made an interesting announcement today. They are claiming to have the world’s first hardware virtualized GPU. Dubbed the FirePro S7150 and S7150 x2, these two server GPUs are not intended as direct output devices, but are to be used to power graphics for virtualized solutions. From the announcement AMD is diving into the cloud gaming, GPU assisted cloud computing and also in GPU accelerated VDI applications.

Apple picked the best time to launch their new Mac Pro. After several months of advertising and solicitation of users, on 19th December they finally allowed users to order their own copy.

After the success of their consumer level APUs it looks like AMD wants to try and bring some of that to the professional world. Yes, they are going to be making something like Trinity for the workstation market. AMD is going to attempt to drop a CPU (or four) inside their FirePro GPUs to see if it sticks.  The move is almost the opposite of what you see with the APUs. In the Llano and Trinity you have a small number of GPU cores that are added into the CPU die in order to provide graphical output. These cores are very efficient and were pulled from AMD’s successful Radeon line of GPUs. In the new FirePro Processors they will maintain the full GPU (just like in a discrete card), but add in CPU cores to create a more functional whole.

At the end of AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit they tried to pull an Apple style trick (saving that “one more thing”). Mark Papermaster came out with a rather large graphics card and announced to the crowd that he was introducing the FirePro W9000. The card has 6GB of GDDR5 a rumored 2,048 cores that are capable of pushing 4TFlops of single precision calculations and 1TFlop of Double Precision calculations.