14 DAY TRIAL // With NVIDIA having revealed so many goodies, or the plans to release many of them, at the GPU Technology Conference, Advanced Micro Devices wasn't about to let the week go by without some sort of launch of its own.
So it confirmed one of the rumors that had been going around the Internet for a couple of months or so: that AMD was making a new high-end professional graphics adapter.
So here we are, welcoming the FirePro W9100, the first graphics adapter in the world to possess 16 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
That's the highest memory capacity ever found on a video card, made doubly impressive when factoring in that there is only one GPU available.
On that note, whenever AMD intros the Radeon R9 295X2, the dual-Hawaii graphics card for gamers will have 16 GB as well.
It can do no less now that R9 R9 29X OEM boards have begun to ship with 8 GB VRAM (Sapphire Radeon R9 290X TOXIC and Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X).
But going back to the FirePro W9100, the newcomer has, as determined by the Hawaii graphics processing units, 2,816 stream processors (SPs), 176 texture mapping units (TMUs), 64 raster operating units (ROPs) and slightly over 2 teraflops double-precision compute performance.
It's the first time ever that a professional graphics card breaks the 22 TFLOPs barrier actually, although the double-precision compute performance is of 2.67 gigaflops, while the single-precision compute performance is of over 5 gflops.
Video content creators should see the most use out of the product, especially when using OpenCL for real-time rendering in 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels).
This would be the part where we would specify the clocks of the AMD FirePro W9100 add-in card, but we can't do that because AMD did not disclose that information. The memory bus width has been kept under wraps as well.
In fact, it hasn't, technically, released the card either. This is just a paper launch really, meant to damper, at least somewhat, the attention that NVIDIA is getting thanks to the GeForce GTX Titan Z and Pascal GPU.
On that note, we don't know when the product will actually become available, so we can't speculate on when the last details will finally make it to the web.
At least we know the display output configuration: six Mini DisplayPort 1.2 connectors. AMD is obviously looking at multi-monitor lovers here. EyeFinity will get a workout for sure.