AMD Upgrades The FirePro W9100 Hawaii XT Graphics Card With 32 GB VRAM – $4999 US Price

Hassan Mujtaba

AMD has updated their FirePro W9100 graphics card to support twice the memory buffer than it originally featured. The FirePro W9100 is now the world's first workstation class graphics card with 32 Gigs of VRAM which is twice the memory buffer the original variant had and is higher than what is offered by competition.

AMD's FirePro W9100 is the world's first and only workstation graphics card with 32 Gigs of VRAM!

AMD's FirePro W9100 Gets Updated - 32 GB of GDDR5 VRAM For An Extra Grand

The AMD FirePro W9100 graphics card was launched two years back for the workstation market. Back in 2014, it shipped with 16 GB of GDDR5 memory but AMD has decided to use denser 8 Gb DRAM chips to upgrade the memory buffer to 32 GB which is the highest amount available on graphics cards these days. Aside from VRAM updates, the specifications of the card remain the same.

The W9100 comes with 6 Display Port connectors for developers and content creators!

With the new AMD FirePro W9100 32GB, AMD is unleashing the world’s largest memory size professional workstation graphics card,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice-president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), AMD. “Along with exceptional hardware, AMD is also delivering software tools to leverage our high bandwidth and large memory GPU configurations effectively.” via AMD

The FirePro W9100 still features the Hawaii XT core based ont he 28nm process. These graphics chips offer good combination of VRAM and Compute hence they are the obvious solutions to house in Workstation and Servers. AMD's recently launched FirePro S9300 x2 which uses their Fiji XT graphics core is a server solution built for the single precision workloads and the card features 8 GB of total on-board VRAM. The Fiji XT chips don't have the same dual precision muscles as the Hawaii cores hence they are still the ideal choices for FP64. Aside from FP64 the Hawaii core can also feature higher VRAM buffers which we are looking at in the latest W9100 solution.

AMD's FirePro W9100 comes with clock speeds of 930 MHz which leads to 5.2 TFLOPs of single precision and 2.6 TFLOPs of double precision compute performance. The card features a 32 GB GDDR5 VRAM that operates with speeds of 5.0 GHz, delivering a total bandwidth of 320 GB/s. The card comes with a 512-bit interface and has a 275W TDP. Do note that both 32 GB and 16 GB versions of the card are available however the 32 GB SKU costs $1000 more than the 16 Gig variant.

AMD FirePro W9100 Features:

At the 2016 NAB Show StudioXperience’s AMD FirePro GPU Zone (booth SL2425), attendees can experience powerful technologies showcased in industry-leading creation applications demonstrating how to efficiently balance content creation workloads with outstanding visual quality, application responsiveness and compute performance. The exhibit showcases solutions from Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Blackmagic Design, Dell, HP and Rhino offering attendees a range of hands-on workflow experiences powered by AMD FirePro professional graphics, including:

  • An AMD product showcase demonstrating support for a VR production workflow featuring the new AMD FirePro W9100 32GB graphics card for speed and ultra-high-definition visual performance, and the Radeon™ Pro Duo graphics card — which forms the world’s most powerful platform for virtual reality (VR)2 when combined with the AMD LiquidVR™ SDK, capable of both creation and consumption of VR content. The AMD FirePro W9100 32GB graphics card is also designed for Computer-Aided Engineering (Siemens NX Nastran, SIMULIA Abaqus) and Visualization tools (AutoDesk VRED 2016).
  • An Autodesk demonstration featuring the AMD FireRender plug-in designed for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2016 powered by an HP workstation with dual AMD FirePro™ W9100 professional graphics.
  • An AMD FirePro graphics demonstration offering increased color accuracy and support for display resolutions up to 4k, as well as GPU-acceleration to empower content creation with the Adobe video tools, including Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC and Adobe After Effects® CC.
  • A free interactive photorealistic ray trace renderer for the forthcoming Rhino version 6 that works inside the Rhino viewport for physically correct material with rendering technology based on the OpenCL™-accelerated AMD FireRender plug-in. via AMD

AMD's FirePro W9100 is tested in a review by 3DTotal.

NVIDIA had also recently updated their flagship workstation offering with 8 Gb memory chips to effectively increase the memory buffer from 12 GB to 24 GB. Both graphics makers now offer the maximum VRAM that can be allocated to their workstation and server parts. The higher VRAM buffer is a good addition for workstation developers and content creators and that is requirement is finally being fulfilled by GPU makers. The FirePro W9100 is available today with 32 GB VRAM at price of $4999 US.

Workstation Generation Comparisons:

GPU NameNVIDIA Quadro M6000NVIDIA Quadro M6000AMD FirePro W9100AMD FirePro W9100NVIDIA Quadro K6000
GPU CoreGM200GM200Hawaii XTHawaii XTGK110
SMM/Compute Units2424444415
Core Count30723072281628162880
Core Clock1140 MHz1140 MHz930 MHz930 MHz900 MHz
ROPs/TMUs96/19296/19264/17664/17648/240
FP32 Compute7.00 TFLOPs7.00 TFLOPs5.24 TFlops5.24 TFlops5.20 TFlops
VRAM24 GB GDDR512 GB GDDR532 GB GDDR516 GB GDDR512 GB GDDR5
Memory Bus384-Bit384-Bit512-Bit512-Bit384-Bit
Memory Clock6.6 GHz6.6 GHz5.0 GHz5.0 GHz6.0 GHz
Memory Bandwidth317.4 GB/s317.4 GB/s320 GB/s320 GB/s288 GB/s
TDP250W250W275W275W225W
Launch20162015201620142013
Pricing$4999 US$4999 US$4999 US$3999 USN/A

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