In a press event at its Sunnyvale, California HQ today, AMD unveiled the latest addition to its FirePro line of workstation-class graphics cards. Matt Skynner, VP and GM of AMD’s graphics business, introduced the FirePro W9100.
The W9100 brings the Hawaii GPU that powers the Radeon R9 290X to a new market, and this professional implementation is the most capable Hawaii-based card yet. AMD says the W9100 has two teraflops of throughput for double-precision math and five teraflops for single-precision datatypes. That likely means it clock speeds are a little lower than in consumer Radeon cards, but the FirePro makes up any deficit through superior hardware elsewhere. The W9100 can drive up to six displays at 4K resolutions simultaneously via an array of six DisplayPort outputs. And, in order to make such a config work well, the W9100 is equipped with a whopping 16GB of GDDR5 memory. That’s a hefty amount of GPU memory, four times what’s used in the Radeon R9 290X.
AMD shared a number of theoretical peak numbers and benchmark results to drive home the point that the FirePro W9100 is more powerful than competing Nvidia Quadro K5000 and K6000 cards.
Meanwhile, AMD Graphics CTO Raja Koduri emphasized how the W9100’s 16GB memory capacity enables new and faster workflows in programs like SolidWorks, Maya, and Abode’s Creative Cloud.
We don’t yet have an official price on the FirePro W9100, but odds are good that it won’t be cheap, given that it’s perhaps the single most capable graphics card of its class.