AMD has two new server 3D accelerators

The US company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced two new server 3D accelerators, designed for professional purposes. As with many other models of the same class, the two new company products belong to the FirePro product line and carry the FirePro S9150 and S9050 brand names.

The FirePro S9150 is the piece of hardware that deserves more attention because according to AMD this is the first server adapter that has performance in excess of 2 TFLOPS when working with double precision values. More specifically the FirePro S9150 reaches 5.07 TFLOPS when working with single-precision values and 2.53 TFLOPS when working with double-precision values. The adapter is based on an AMD Hawaii GPU that comes with 2816 stream processors and there are 16 gigs of memory and a 512-bit memory bus. The TDP of the card is rather high, though – it reaches 235 watts. Strangely enough it comes with a passive cooling system.

The AMD FirePro S9150 supports DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 1.2. The novelty also comes with AMD Stream and PowerTune technologies. In addition there is the ZeroCore Power technology that reduces unneeded power consumption.

The AMD FirePro S9050 is also a server card, although it is a bit slower than the S9150. This card is based on an AMD Tahiti GPU and has 1792 stream processors; apart from this fact it is completely identical to the S9000 model. The S9050 card reaches 3.23 TFLOPS when working with single-precision values and has 806 GFLOPS of double-precision power. The card has 12 GB of VRAM and a 384-bit memory bus. In addition to that this model has a DisplayPort connection, passive cooling and 225W of TDP.

Both cards will reach the market in Q3 2014 and will be available from Sapphire – a major AMD partner when it comes to 3D graphics cards.

Source: AMD