14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, we noted that Advanced Micro Devices had entered an agreement with Apple tosupply FirePro graphics to Mac Pro workstations. Now, we are bringing you the actual products.
AMD has launched the FirePro D300, D500 and D700 professional GPUs, which are actually graphics modules with two GPUs each.
That's right, these things are powerful, overpowered some might say, video boards with two graphics processors each.
And they aren't just any GPUs, but chips with up to 2,048 stream processors each, as well as up to 7 teraflops of computing power.
Each GPU gets up to 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM to work with, leading up to a possible total of 12 GB per board. Clearly, AMD is not pulling any punches.
That said, the new FirePro adapters support OpenCL (Open Computing Language), which is sort of an open source alternative to NVIDIA CUDA GPU computing and decoding.
With OpenCL, it's possible to edit full-resolution 4K videos and render background effects at the same time, and still have enough performance left to power three 4K .
"We are very proud to offer dual AMD FirePro professional graphics in the new Mac Pro to empower users with the power and performance they need for uncompromising creativity and productivity," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, graphics business unit, AMD.
"AMD prides itself on quality support and development for our professional graphics solutions. Backed by award winning graphics technology, we believe Mac Pro users will experience top notch results with AMD FirePro GPUs."
All new AMD FirePro GPUs are designed based on the Graphics Core Next architecture. Blackmagic Design and The Foundry are two of the customers besides Apple that have adopted the boards.
"We really enjoyed working with AMD to maximize MARI's performance on the new Mac Pro. We've seen some of the best performance out of the box from MARI with the dual FirePro GPUs in the Mac Pro," said Jack Greasley, MARI product manager at The Foundry.