First Official AMD FirePro W9000 Benchmarks

Back in 2011 when AMD first launched the GCN architecture and the impressive “Tahiti” GPU, everybody was amazed at the gaming performance, but not many were expecting the level of GPU compute raw power that the first GCN generation brings.

The company has managed to design such a powerful GPU compute architecture that it still takes Nvidia and Intel millions of dollars, tens of thousands of work hours and months to try and match.

Intel has been working on the Larabee architecture for more than half a decade now and the Xeon Phi accelerator card that we’ve reported on here is still chasing the 1TFLOP DP FP64 performance goal.

Nvidia on the other hand seems to have made a step backwards as the new GK104 GPU is only able to put out less than 0.1 TFLOPS of double precision floating point performance while the older, Fermi-based generation is able to reach more than 0.6 TFLOPS.

AMD’s W9000 FirePro professional graphics adapter is able to deliver more than 1 TFLOP of double precision floating point computing performance and the impression AMD left us is that they weren’t even designing the Tahiti GPU with such high GPU compute performance as the main goal.

Moving from GPU compute to the CAD and OpenGL professional applications, we can see from AMD’s official benchmarking that the company’s new line is much faster than the competing models from Nvidia.

While Nvidia tried to spoil AMD’s W9000 launch from the other day, AMD doesn’t have anything to worry from its main competitor because Nvidia’s solutions will only come to the market in October and December 2012 respectively.

Nvidia’s stunt was clearly an image move. It was a desperate attempt to distract the enthusiasts and professionals’ attention from the crushing performance specifications and result displayed by AMD’s new generation.

The green team reshuffled the same specs regarding technologies that will be implemented in their K20 card, but they never offered any performance figures or estimations.



The Quadro 5000 and especially the K20 are going to be very impressive when launched, but we’re almost half a year away from K20 availability and, until then, AMD has the best solutions for the CAD and GPU compute applications.




Via: First Official AMD FirePro W9000 Benchmarks