AMD Graphics Land Inside Dell Servers

Advanced Micro Devices may be best known for its consumer processors and graphics products, but it definitely has a stake in the industrial segment, servers included, as proven by how its FirePro graphics found a new home, courtesy of Dell.

Servers don't really need too much graphics prowess, since their purpose is mostly to store data and handle incoming and outgoing connections.

In other words, they are more focused on the memory and storage side of things, besides processing.

Still, the fact of the matter is that professional graphics adapters can still play a fairly important role in such applications, thanks to their huge parallel processing power.

AMD's Firepro V7800P professional adapter have, thus, gained a place inside Dell blade servers, aided by their passive cooling, energy efficient design and single and double floating-point performance.

“AMD and Dell share a long history of collaboration spanning commercial and consumer notebooks and desktops, workstations and servers,” said Brian Payne, executive director of Platform Marketing for Dell’s PowerEdge Server portfolio.

“We’re collaborating together to drive innovation around graphics processing solutions and you won’t find a better example than our Dell PowerEdge M610x blade. This blade helps support and accelerates multiple remote users while providing a rich graphical experience and maximum hardware asset utilization.”

When used in client or server systems, AMD FirePro V7800P professional graphics can perform remote graphics, Virtual Desktop and GPU compute tasks, among other things.

The cards have a starting price of $1,249 and will perform best in blade servers, rackmount servers and PCI Expansion chassis.

“The AMD FirePro V7800P is AMD’s first multifunctional server solution for compute, VDI and professional graphics offering IT departments GPU compute for High Performance Computing matched with leading edge graphics virtualization,” said Sandeep Gupte, director of professional graphics product management, AMD.

“The AMD FirePro V7800P allows AMD to draw upon a powerful professional graphics solution to meet the needs of an entirely new set of data center customers.”