Here's AMD's New FirePro W8100 New Professional Graphics Card
Following the release of the FirePro W9100 flagship professional graphics card, AMD is back with the release of the W8100. The W8100 is designed to be a follow-up to AMD's existing Tahiti based FirePro products. It is based on the Hawaii GPU and it is intended to refresh AMD's professional lineup by improving performance and feature set.
So the W8100 is a more affordable alternative to AMD's flagship FirePro. It is utilizing a 40 CU design (4 CUs disabled) to offer 2560 stream processors and 160 texture units. It has a 64 ROP plus 512-bit (320GB/sec) memory bus configuration and uses 8GB of GDDR5.
| AMD FirePro W9100 | AMD FirePro W8100 | |
| Stream Processors | 2816 | 2560 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 160 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 |
| Core Clock | 930MHz | 824MHz |
| Memory Clock | 5GHz GDDR5 | 5GHz GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 512-bit | 512-bit |
| VRAM | 16GB | 8GB |
| Double Precision | 1/2 | 1/2 |
| Transistor Count | 6.2B | 6.2B |
| TDP | 275W | 220W |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm |
| Architecture | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.1 |
| Warranty | 3-Year | 3-Year |
| Price | $3999 | $2499 |
Clockspeeds are down from the W9100, dropping from 930MHz to 824MHz. This puts theoretical compute performance at 4.2 TFLOPS single precision or 2.1 TFLOPS double precisio. The card's power usage is just 220W, allowing W8100 to be used in more constrained workstations that can only handle a 225W (6pin + 6pin) video card.
The W8100 features 4 full sized DisplayPorts that can drive up to four 4K displays.
As with the W9100, AMD is targeting the mixed graphics/compute workload market with the W8100, banking on the Hawaii GPU's ability to efficiently handle both tasks.
And of course, the card will face the competition of
NVIDIA's Quadro K5000, which is priced similarly at around $2000.
