AMD announces Firepro S10000 server graphics family

Nick Mertes 12 Nov, 2012 at 9:28pm ET Article published in Tech

AMD has announced the latest members of the FirePro line: The FirePro S10000 Server Graphics Family.

	FirePro S10000	FirePro S9000	FirePro V9800P	FirePro S7000	FirePro V7800P
MSRP	$3599	$2499	$2499	$1249	$1249
Form factor	Dual slot	Dual slot	Dual slot	Single slot	Single slot
GPU Family	Tahiti (2x)	Tahiti	Cypress	Pitcairn XT	Cypress
Shader Processors	2048×2	2048	1600	1280	1440
Texture Units	128×2	128	80	80	72
Render Output Units	32×2	32	32	32	32
Core Clock	825MHz	900MHz	825MHz	950MHz	700MHz
Memory Clock	????MHz	1375MHz	1150MHz	1200MHz	1000MHz
Memory Size	6GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Bus	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit	128-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (ECC off)	480GB/s	264GB/s	147GB/s	153.6GB/s	128GB/s
TDP	375W	275W	225W	150W	138W
TFLOPS(single/double precision)	5.91 single precison 1.48 double precision	3.23 single precison 0.86 double precision	2.64 single precision 0.528 double precision	2.43 single precision 0.152 double precision	2.0 single precision 0.4 double precision
PCI Express Support	3.0 x16	3.0 x16	2.0 x16	3.0 x16	2.0 x16
Display Outputs	4x Mini DisplayPort 1.2 1x DVI	1x Mini DisplayPort 1.2	1x DisplayPort 1.1	4x DisplayPort 1.2	2x DisplayPort 1.21x Dual-Link DVI

As dual GPU solution, the S10000 nearly doubles the performance of the S9000. The memory clock speeds weren’t officially announced, but given the bandwidth and some quick math, 1.25GHz sounds about right. This will be the first card to support over 1 TFLOP DP. Despite having nearly twice the power of the S9000, the S10000 draws only 100W more under load than its smaller sibling. When compared to NVIDIA’s Tesla K10, the FirePro S10000 compares very favorably; the S10000 achieves 5.91 TFLOPS in single precision while the Kepler-based Tesla K10 manages 4.58 TFLOPS. Moving to double precision, the S10000 pulls 1.48 TFLOPS compared to the K10’s 0.19 TFLOPS.

On a performance-per-watt basis, the FirePro S10000 should prove to be an excellent GPU. While nearly doubling the FirePro S9000’s performance, it draws only 100W more. The extra power does apparently cross a threshold though—the S10000 is the first in its line to use an active cooling solution.

AMD also took some time during the product announcement to discuss the expanding software support for FirePro’s virtual desktop capabilities. Citrix XenServer 6 supports multiple users on a single virtualized GPU through thin clients or other devices supported by the Citrix Receiver client application. VMWare ESXi and ESX support direct access to the GPU—currently this remains a one GPU per user model, but VMWare is working to enable many users to share a signle GPU. Microsoft’s RemoteFX allows graphics acceleration on virtual machines sharing a single GPU with no special graphics hardware on the client side. All of these solutions support the FirePro graphics lines.

The FirePro S10000 will be available to system vendors starting today at an MSRP of $3599.

Comments

12 Nov 2012 ~ 9:36pm Thrax Hello, New Zealand. I've missed you.
12 Nov 2012 ~ 9:43pm Canti
$3599
12 Nov 2012 ~ 9:53pm NullenVoyd Servers don't need video cards, silly.
12 Nov 2012 ~ 10:03pm DAS servers are to serve ,if the service requires graphics rendering ,then yes it does need GRAPHIC CARDS
12 Nov 2012 ~ 10:15pm Tushon
servers are to serve ,if the service requires graphics rendering ,then yes it does need GRAPHIC CARDS
Quite
12 Nov 2012 ~ 10:37pm Garg Servers gonna SERVE.
12 Nov 2012 ~ 10:54pm NullenVoyd Will this run a text console in EGA?
13 Nov 2012 ~ 12:06am RootWyrm It's a VDI solution. Not a server graphics card. Not a server processing card.
Of course, to be of any real value, VDI would first need to NOT SUCK. You can cram a decent number of users onto that card - as long as they aren't using Aero and you keep them at crap resolutions. Like, say, 1440x900 or 1680x1050 @ 16bpp 60Hz. Presuming you've got 10GbE into the box.
1920x1080, much less 1920x1200? Uh, yeah. Let's do some math here. A given pixel is 3 bytes; 1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels. 2073600 * 3 bytes (32bpp or emulated 12-bit color) = 6220800 bytes/cycle, 60Hz = 60 cycles/second. Thus, 6220800 * 60 = 373248000 bytes/second. That's 2847Mbit/s. Per display.
The things they do to cram that into Gigabit Ethernet basically mean that the S10000 will be great for taking graphics render load off the CPU, but they'll still be stuck with high latency crap they hate.
23 Nov 2012 ~ 7:49am Creeperbane2 /drool