AMD debuts new compute card with 32 GB of VRAM

AMD has officially announced the new AMD FirePro S9170 server video card, which is the world’s first and fastest single-GPU video card that is designed for heavy double-precision workloads. Another major perk of the new FirePro S9170 is that is comes with 32 GB of VRAM, which is simply awesome.

The new FirePro S9170 fully supports OpenCL 2.0 and features a GPU, which is based on the second-generation AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The new card can deliver up to 5.24 TFLOPS of peak single-precision power, while enabling full throughput double precision performance, providing up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance.

AMD is recognized as an HPC industry innovator as the graphics provider with the top spot on the November 2014 Green500 List. Today the best GPU for compute just got better with the introduction of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU to complement AMD’s impressive array of server graphics offerings for high performance compute environments,” said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group. “The AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU can accelerate complex workloads in scientific computing, data analytics, or seismic processing, wielding an industry-leading 32 GB of memory. We designed the new offering for supercomputers to achieve massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets.”

“There are some HPC workloads which require as much data as possible to stay resident on the device, and so the 32 GB of memory provided by AMD FirePro S9170, the largest available on a single GPU, will enable the acceleration of scientific calculations that were previously impossible,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the Microelectronics Research Group at the University of Bristol. “For example, our new OpenCL version of the SNAP transport code from Los Alamos National Laboratory needs to keep as much data resident on the device as possible, and so the 32 GB of memory will let us run problems of a much more interesting size faster than ever before. The large memory, combined with the 320 GB/s memory bandwidth and double precision floating point performance, will make the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU a ‘killer’ solution device for many HPC applications.”

The new AMD FirePro S9170 comes with 32 GB of GDDR5 memory, which is serviced by a 512-bit memory bus for total memory bandwidth of 320 GB/sec. This makes the card offer 33 per cent more memory than competitive GPUs in the same range. The card will be commercially available in Q3 2015. No word on pricing as of now.

Source: AMD