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Advanced Micro Devices offers to sell its professional graphics cards for workstations or servers with a massive discount to first time buyers in an attempt to increase its revenue and market share.
ATI Technologies and then Advanced Micro Devices was an underdog on the market of professional graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware for many years because of various reasons, which includes poor drivers, low performance and heavy competition from Nvidia Corp. However, in the recent years the situation began to change. AMD gradually improved its graphics drivers and worked closely with developers of CAD/CAM/CAE/DCC and other workstation-class professional software to mend performance and compatibility issues. At present AMD commands roughly one quarter of the workstation GPU market and it clearly wants to gain more share.
In a bid to attract attention of professionals, AMD recently kicked off its “Experience AMD FirePro” campaign that is designed for those, who do not currently own an AMD FirePro graphics adapter, but would like to try it. For a limited time only AMD will return up to 50 per cent of a FirePro’s card's price to qualified customers who purchase a professional AMD graphics adapter, or a workstation featuring such a board, from an AMD approved reseller. AMD offers up to 50 per cent rebates, or up to £1195/$1995/€1460, on AMD FirePro W9100, AMD FirePro W8100, AMD FirePro W8000, AMD FirePro W7000 as well as on AMD FirePro S9000 and AMD FirePro S7000 cards.
Note that customers have to register for a pre-approval code first before making a purchase. The promotion is open for customers in the U.K., the U.S., Canada (excluding Quebec), Germany and France. The campaign only lasts until the 31st of December, 2014.
According to Jon Peddie Research, in Q3 2014 the industry shipped approximately 1.02 million workstations, a 4.7% gain over the same period a year ago, along with a modest 2.8% quarterly decline over Q2 2014's all-time high. AMD and Nvidia sold a total of approximately 1.28 million workstation-caliber GPUs in the third quarter, including both mobile modules and desktop add-in cards.
It can be observed that only around 260 thousand of workstation-class graphics solutions were either sold not as a part of workstation computers, or were installed as secondary professional GPUs inside very powerful PCs. Therefore, while the market of retail professional hardware exists, it is rather small. Still, if AMD wants to gain market share in general, it has to address this one as well, even though it is a small fraction of the whole workstation GPU market.
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KitGuru Says: Running a rebate/discount campaign is one of the ways to increase sales and market share. However, the terms of the program seem to be rather strict and end-users or organizations will need to be approved by AMD first, which will scare off a lot of potential clients. Still, given the price of FirePro graphics boards, it is not really surprising that AMD is cautious about the cash-back promotion…
“AMD offers up to 50 per cent rebates”
This will do nothing for them. They will still lose money, be forced to sell newer cards at higher prices, lose more money, and extrapolate till they are out of business. There is a reason they don’t profit on anything but Console sales.
Why would anybody even pay that much for a graphics card. I cant even find the specs for this … thing.
This is for /professionals/ not high end gaming rigs. It is for displaying 3D modelling software that has yet to be optimised and therefor has large requirement for RAM and other specs that arent really required by an end user.
Coming from someone that does not know what he is talking about we don’t need fanboys on this site, for the price they are selling these for I can build a workstation that is 2 to 3 times faster then anything that Nvidia has so yes I am in.
Sorry what? Nvidia has the fastest cards out there, both in consumer gpu and workstation gpu. They are just more expensive. Ever heard of the Quadro series? You should probably know facts before you accuse others of not knowing. Your fanboy comment is unfounded, since you brought up Nvidia. Makes it pretty obvious who the fanboy here is. I simply said that this won’t help AMD out of their hole, and there’s a reason for it.
You do realize that these aren’t for gaming right? Like… if you buy these for gaming, you won’t get the performance you want. There’s is a world way over your head that has nothing to do with gaming. Seems like you’re one of those people with more money than than sense.
Said who AMD pros card have higher compute then Nvidia cards and at that price I can buy 3 of them instead of 2 of the Nvidia cards.
Again I’ll start with, Sorry, what? Wtf does that statement even mean? It doesn’t matter anyway, since you’re wrong, and I have 8 pieces of proof: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/specviewperf-12-workstation-graphics-benchmark,3778.html
Not one of those benches had AMD on top, and I doubt they’ll make it any time soon. In fact, their consumer GPU beat the workstation GPU a lot of the time, which just proves how worthless the cards are. Please educate yourself before trying to argue.
So far, Nvidia k6000 is pretty much at the top. For half the cost of a quadro k6000 you can get a W9100 and get very similar performance. Nvidia still beats it in performance but not price to performance.
http://hothardware.com/reviews/Workstation-War-AMDs-FirePro-W9100-vs-Nvidias-Quadro-K6000
I never disputed that. All I was saying originally is that this deal won’t help AMD. Look at the benches I posted above. The Firepro has some disappointing results. It gets beat by the 290x more than once. I don’t honestly believe PtP is worth it if you have to replace it in 4 months. I’d rather buy the Nvidia and be set for the year at least.
Read this then you will understand what compute is http://wccftech.com/amd-compares-firepro-professional-gpus-quadro/.
Very funny if most of the standard programs in the industry will not support AMD pro-cards properly?
It is no coincidence the automotive industry refers to Nvida alone.
Look at the market share for workstation graphics:
-nvidia about 81%
-AMD about 18%
-Rest /Others 1%
(source: http://marketrealist.com/2014/11/investors-need-understand-nvidias-business/
AMD FirePro is only for small to medium-sized companies with very low budget. This is the only area AMD can get around. In the big business they are long counted out.
Cute. I noticed how they left out the K6000, which is newer, cheaper, and has better performance. Just like most AMD comparisons, they compare their newer tech to older Nvidia tech to get the better numbers. It’s just like when the 900 series came out, they ran a bench using 4 version old drivers that didn’t support the 900 series, and boasted about higher frames. Just like when the “captain jack ” benches leaked, the fine print said they limited the 980 to half of its VRAM to get the results they got.
Either way, your link is worthless. “Compute” is just some arbitrary statistic made up to make AMD look good, and nothing more. Real world tests, like what I linked above, show universally that AMD Firepro is a crappy sub-par workstation card. Educate yourself.