AMD FirePro W9100: Hawaii GPU goes to work with 16GB of GDDR5

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday introduced its first professional graphics card based on the code-named “Hawaii” graphics processing unit. The new solution for CAD, CAM, DCC and other professionals boasts unbeatable DP FP compute performance in addition to whopping 16GB of memory and six 4K display outputs.

As expected, the AMD FirePro W9100 professional graphics card is based on the code-named Hawaii XT graphics processing unit in its advanced configuration with 2816 stream processors (which also suggests that it has 176 texture units, 64 raster operating units and 512-bit memory bus, but we cannot confirm that). The graphics board is equipped with incredible amount of GDDR5 memory with ECC capability, 16GB, the world’s first for a single-chip graphics solution. The novelty also features six mDP 1.2 ports that can support up to six 4K (3840*2160) displays.

AMD states that the FirePro W9100 professional solution features over 5TFLOPS of single-precision compute power and over 2TFLOPS of double-precision compute power (AMD claims that the Hawaii XT GPU is configured in such a way that to enable half of SP rate in double-precision computations). Exact clock-rates of the FirePro W9100 are unknown, so are the exact peak performance rates.

Modern professional workflows include not only design itself, but also simulation as well as visualization, which is why AMD and Nvidia not only offer high performance in professional graphics applications, but also in simulation and visualization programs. As a result, GPGPU performance gains importance in general.

According to AMD, the FirePro W9100 professional graphics solution significantly outperforms rivals like Quadro K5000, Quadro K6000 as well Tesla K20X in Luxmark 2.0 OpenCL benchmark in both single-GPU and multi-GPU configurations. The W9100 is also well ahead of the K6000 in SiSoft Sandra FP64 benchmark.

Based on data from AMD, the FirePro W9100 is also ahead of its rivals in SolidWorks 2014.

AMD FirePro W9100 will be available in April. Pricing will be announced at that time.

KitGuru Says: It is interesting to note that AMD decided not to introduce other new professional graphics solutions based on Hawaii graphics processor at this time. The company clearly needs a “less high-end” FirePro W8100 featuring Hawaii as well as Radeon Sky series for cloud computing. It does not look like AMD plans to refresh its FireStream family of GPGPU accelerators for technical computers as it has not done that for four years now.

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