14 DAY TRIAL // Many were surprised when AMD launched the W series here and never mentioned anything new about the FireStream line. Most professional graphics and computing enthusiasts were disappointed that the company gave up on the specific GPU compute line of products and apparently yielded to Nvidia’s Tesla.
The reality is that AMD is just restructuring its product lines and the company has decided to give the FireStream brand a rest and concentrate on making the FirePro more popular.
The good news is that the Texas-based CPU and GPU design company is now launching the FirePro S series, and these new cards are practically the direct successors of the old and somewhat successful FireStream cards.
These cards are imbued with the new, GPU compute-oriented GCN architecture and come with the expected passive cooling solutions.
Only two cards are being launched today, and the most powerful is called the FirePro S9000.
This GPU compute server accelerator is powered by the popular Tahiti XT chip that comes with 1792 stream processing units enabled, 112 texturing units and 32 ROPs, all running at a conservative 900 MHz frequency and working with a 5.5 GHz GDDR5 memory.
There are 6 GB of such GDDR5 memory present on the card working on the well-known 384-bit BUS.
It seems that AMD is satisfied with a 0.8 TFLOP DP FP64 compute performance and we see no reason why they shouldn’t be, as Intel’s Xeon Phi promising 1 TFLOP of double precision floating point performance is nowhere to be found.
Nvidia is far behind AMD in this area, as its K10 has a meager DP FP64 performance that’s less than a quarter of what AMD’s S9000 is offering.
The second card launched today is the S7000, powered by a Pitcairn GPU and featuring a very modest single-slot passive cooling solution, making it suitable for high-density setups.
This card uses a 256-bit BUS for its 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and sports a 2.4 TFLOP of single precision floating point performance.
Priced at $2500 (€2000), S9000 is surely going to hurt Nvidia’s Tesla sales in the following two or three months.
The S7000 is slated at $1250 (€1000), and that’s quite competitive considering Nvidia’s DP FP64 handicap characteristic for the Kepler architecture and the fact that AMD’s new card is very cool and doesn’t require a double-slot cooling solution.
