AMD Announces FirePro W8100

AMD has announced its latest graphics card for workstations and small HPC systems. The W8100 has to compete with Nvidia’s K5000 card and would therefore receive a comparable price.

The W8100 is a slimmed down variant of the W9100 and is based on a GPU from the Hawaii generation. The W8100 somewhat resembles a 290 PRo with more memory: there are 2560 stream processors available that work at 824MHz. The card is equipped with 8GB gddr5 memory that is addressed via a 512-bit wide bus. That provides a memory bandwidth of 320GB/s. With single precision calculations it is 4.2Tflops, with double precision it is 2.1Tflops. The W8100 is connected with two six-pin power connectors and it dissipates a maximum of 220W.

The card is mainly intended for business use, where CAD designers, among others, could not only make their designs with it, but also perform physics calculations and make renders that can be displayed on UHD screens. The cards would also be suitable for video editing: they can control four UHD screens at 30fps and display effects in real time. The suggested retail price of the W8100 is $2,500, but because it has to compete directly with Nvidia’s K5000, the final price will be lower.