FirePro Archives - VR World

AMD, Breaking, Enterprise, Hardware, News

AMD Unveils FirePro S9300 X2 with a Supercomputer Design Win

Recently, we posted an in-depth story detailing the birth of Radeon Pro Duo. As we all probably know, AMD created two designs for the dual Fiji GPU. In the end, AMD brought just a single design to market and a server grade one to boot. The company just introduced the FirePro S9300 X2, sharing the same server-grade design as the Radeon Pro Duo, with the main difference being that the FirePro model was clocked down in order to allow for optimal operation using server-grade air cooling. Given that S9300 X2 is rated at 46 GLOPS/Watt and operates within 300 Watt thermal limit (302W to be

AMD, Breaking, Companies, HP, Mobile Computing, News

Did HP Equalize Desktop and Notebook Performance with AMD FirePro?

For as long as I can remember, the quest of equalizing desktop and mobile performance haunts every manufacturer. However, notebooks are thermally challenged environments and you simply can’t put desktop components inside, unless you’re talking about heavy duty desktop replacements from manufacturers such as Eurocom. Still, a lot of progress is being made with the form factor even from the biggest companies on the market. Last September, HP introduced value oriented Z workstations. HP Focuses the Z series on “3D CAD, Design Visualization, CAM and Simulation”, and starting at $879 all the way into the low five digit range. HP openly states that moving to an M.2, NVMe

3D, AMD, Breaking, Game Developer Conference (GDC), Graphics, Hardware, News

AMD Unveils XConnect Graphics for Laptops

Need for powerful graphics in notebooks is reaching the tipping point, as Virtual Reality and especially Augmented Reality require even more compute power than a hihg-resolution display. Eight years ago, AMD tried to answer the demands of that era by launching the XGP – eXternal Graphics Platform. This short-lived standard was only supported by Fujitsu Siemens AG, and other vendors sadly chickened out. Fast forward to Autumn 2015, with AMD launching R9 Nano. This small card only draws 175 Watts and yet, it achieves about 85% of performance offered by the top-of-the-line R9 Fury X. We mentioned that this card would be an ideal pairing in high-end

AMD, Enterprise, Graphics, Hardware, News, Nvidia

AMD Launches its Virtual GPU

Several years after NVIDIA launched its GRID vGPU architecture, AMD is entering the graphics virtualization market with its FirePro S7150 and S7150 x2 graphics processors. This is probably the last product AMD is launching utilizing its Tonga GPU architecture, also known as ‘Volcanic Islands’ or ‘GCN 1.2’ family of products. FirePro S7150 packs a single Tonga GPU and 8GB of ECC GDDR5 memory, while as the name says, FirePro S7150 x2 (why the small ‘x’?) is a dual-GPU with two Tonga GPUs and 16GB of ECC GDDR5 memory. Hardware capabilities are quite impressive – the products in question can support up to 16 users per GPU. By taking a GPGPU

Audio/Video, Graphics, Hardware, Software Programs, VR World

AMD Launches W8100, Cuts GPUs Prices 50% for First GPU

Today was an interesting day in AMDland, first the company announced their latest GPU, the FirePro W8100 and then later in the day they announced a program where you could buy any of their latest GPUs for a whopping 50% as long as its the first one, every subsequent one will be full price. But first, you have to go through an ‘approval process’. Now, let’s get back to the new GPU AMD just announced, what is it exactly? Well, the FirePro W8100 is part of AMD’s professional line of graphics cards branded as FirePro. So, looking at the rough specs we can see that the

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel, Memory & Storage Space

ANALYSIS: Why will GDDR5 rule the world?

This memory standard will become a pervasive memory during next four years in much more fields than “just” graphics. Just like GDDR3 ended up in all three consoles, network switches, cellphones and even cars and planes, GDDR5 brings a lot of new features that are bound to win more customers from different markets. Background The reason for development of radical ideas inside GDDR5 lies in the fact that ATI was looking at future GPU architectures, and concluded that the DRAM industry has to take a radical step in design and offer interface more flexible than any other memory standard. Then, ATI experienced huge issues with

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel

Nvidia aims at workstation market, desktops and notebooks

Fudo and his gang discovered MCP7A-GL motherboard over at Chinese Iworkstation.com.cn. This motherboard is “body of evidence” that Nvidia finally found the guts to go after the workstation market with embedded Quadro chipset. Over the course of years, I’ve seen couple of Quadro motherboards, but Nvidia never dedicated themselves to creating a market. Personally, I saw that as a big mistake, and often questioned chipset guys about professional solutions. Nvidia was afraid that the move would cannibalize their cash cow, Quadro series of cards, but that fear just didn’t made any sense – at the end of the day, a company has to increase the

3D, AMD, Business, Companies, Graphics, Hardware, Intel, Software Programs

Nvidia’s $50 card destroys ATI’s $500 one or “Why ATI sucks in Folding?”

As you might already know, I am a bit enthusiastic when it comes to distributed computing. I’ve been looking for aliens through SETI@home, later with BOINC… but then, Folding@Home showed up and I became an enthusiast for this valuable project from Stanford University. My family had some share of dealings with Alzheimer’s (aka AD) and Parkinson’s diseases (aka PD) and I won’t go here into what psychological and ultimately financial stress that families around the world, including my own – have to endure. Folding@Home is also a project that pioneered the use of GPUs for distributed computing (if I am wrong on this one, feel

Uncategorized

AMD releasing professional cards to partners – Sapphire first

Ever since AMD/ATI took over FireGL, the company was the only manufacturer of professional graphics cards. FireGL, FireStream, and now FirePro – they were all coming out with ATI logo on the box. But not anymore – AMD is going the Nvidia route and starting to introduce partners who will manufacture and sell the cards in a higher-standard program than is the case with consumer cards. As logic dictates, Sapphire Technologies was the first company to release a non-AMD manufactured professional card – FireStream 9250. We expect that more companies follow suit – I remember that Diamond introduced their FireGL cards in the Radeon 2900

3D, Hardware, Software Programs, VR World

Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)

I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of

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