AMD ProGraphics gets an Overhaul
August 2014 – Following the launch of the AMD Firepro W9100 at NAB and the W8100 at Infocomm, AMD has now released the full line of the redesigned and re-architected professional series graphics cards. The W8100 and W9100 are high end cards for the content creation and 3D design world with both the highest performance on-screen graphics capability and the highest performance GPU compute capability in the Firepro line.
New AMD FirePro Professional Graphics structure
There are a number of fundamental shifts in the new Firepro line. The major change is the NextGen core that is the heart of the new graphics card. This NextGen core has improved I/O design, datapath and internal architecture to provide a dramatic improvement in the power-performance of the chip as it has migrated to the new process technology nodes. The core is wrapped by the new Mantle Driver and Mantle API which simplifies the interface to the part, and allows direct access to the core through the higher level language APU interface. On top of the Mantle layers is the Graphics Application layer which includes support for OpenCl 1.2 and OpenGL 3.0 ES.
The new cards span not only the high end range of graphics application, but start at the mainstream entry level of high resolution multi-screen applications for finance and medical with the W2100. The W4100 is a mid range professional card, still targeted at finance and medial applications, that supports four (4) 4K displays with 512 GCN Stream processors. For applications with heavier draw requirements, the W5100 addresses the same displays but with 768 GCN stream processors which deliver up to 2M triangles/s using Geometry Boost. The entry level card for the CAD and M&E market is the W7100. This card features 4 triangles/clock Geometry boost and 1792 GCN Stream processors. For the M&E Marketplace, these means 12X faster encoding, the ability to display on three 4K SST panels at 60Hz, and a unified video decoder that supports H.264, VC-1, MPEG4, MPEG2 and MJPEG.
All of these new graphics cards have at least 2x more GDDR5 graphics memory than the previous generation cards, and all support multi-display 4K monitors under DP1.2. The NextGen core provides a higher compute performance for a given power level, and to feed that performance have a higher graphics bandwidth driven by the new PCIe gen 3.0 support.
The cards are phasing into the market as both stand-alone cards for retrofit into existing systems, and on new workstations available from the major providers in 2014.
