AMD Shows Off Monstrous Professional Graphics Card... And Maybe The Radeon 7990
AMD Shows Off Monstrous Professional Graphics Card... And Maybe The Radeon 7990
Graphics professionals need big-league processing power, and AMD aims to scratch that itch with its FirePro line of GPUs. Earlier this week, the company announced the launch of the FirePro W600, the first of the line to incorporate AMD's 28nm and GCN technology. Hopefully you didn't run out and buy one immediately, because today AMD showed off that card's big brother, the FirePro W9000, and it's a memory-filled beast. And hey, did we just see the first Radeon 7990, too?
First, the FirePro W9000; in addition to the 28nm Tahiti-based GPU, the card packs in 6GB of GDDR5 memory and six DisplayPorts. It's capable of pushing out 264.8 million pixels per second, with 4 TFLOPS of single-precision math and 1 TFLOPS double-precision.
Now for the interesting part: the slide for the FirePro W9000 showed a card that looked a lot like a typical Radeon 7000 series entry, but the card that AMD CTO Mark Papermaster held during the talk was a much different sight to behold, with three fans clearly visible. Was this the long-rumored dual-GPU Radeon 7990 rather than the FirePro W9000?
TechReport's Cyril Kowaliski grabbed a senior AMD rep's shoulder on the way out and asked him just what, exactly, Papermaster showed off to the crowd. The response: "A dual-GPU product that will be released later this year."
Update 6/16/12: we've edited the article to clarify that the FirePro W9000 is not a dual-GPU card, although the card Papermaster was holding is. The original version stated that the FirePro card sported dual GPUs.
Image credit: TechReport.com
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