14 DAY TRIAL // The AMD Fusion Developer Summit is drawing to a close, and Advanced Micro Devices revealed what it was saving for last: a professional graphics card to overshadow all others.
We aren't talking about the FirePro W600. That one showed up a couple of days ago and it is a variation of the Radeon HD 7750. It’s also a small fry compared to this thing.
The big graphics card in that photo up there, provided by the folks at Bright Side of News, is called FirePro W9000.
Yes, the card really is that big. Advanced Micro Devices will reveal most of the relevant specs at SIGGRAPH, an event set to take place in August, 2012.
That doesn't mean it didn't let some details slip this time too, though. In fact, AMD's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mark Papermaster was quite happy to share some things during the last AFDS keynote.
First off, the FirePro W9000 is powered by a Tahiti graphics processing unit (may or may not be Tahiti XT2 or something similar). Said GPU is clocked at 1 GHz.
Additionally, the adapter will possess 6 GB of GDDR5 memory. Professional graphics adapters are often used in video and 3D graphics design, so a large VRAM capacity is a must.
There is also the presence of six DirplayPorts to consider. It takes more than the average amount of virtual memory to display high-resolution images across so many screens, not to mention to ensure that visuals are rendered smoothly.
That said, like on all Tahiti-based cards, the memory interface is of 384 bits.
All this boils down to a Single Precision IEEE 754-2011 floating-point performance of 4TFLOPS and a double-precision performance of 1 TFLOP.
That's not half bad, especially for an air-cooled piece of hardware (those three, red fans measure 92mm in diameter each).