Earlier this month AMD launched a dual Fiji powerhouse for VR gamers it is calling the Radeon Pro Duo. Now, AMD is bringing its latest GCN architecture and HBM memory to servers with the dual GPU FirePro S9300 x2.
The new server-bound professional graphics card packs an impressive amount of computing hardware into a dual-slot card with passive cooling. The FirePro S9300 x2 combines two full Fiji GPUs clocked at 850 MHz for a total of 8,192 cores, 512 TUs, and 128 ROPs. Each GPU is paired with 4GB of non-ECC HBM memory on package with 512GB/s of memory bandwidth which AMD combines to advertise this as the first professional graphics card with 1TB/s of memory bandwidth.
Due to lower clockspeeds the S9300 x2 has less peak single precision compute performance versus the consumer Radeon Pro Duo at 13.9 TFLOPS versus 16 TFLOPs on the desktop card. Businesses will be able to cram more cards into their rack mounted servers though since they do not need to worry about mounting locations for the sealed loop water cooling of the Radeon card.
FirePro S9300 x2 | Radeon Pro Duo | R9 Fury X | FirePro S9170 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
GPU | Dual Fiji | Dual Fiji | Fiji | Hawaii |
GPU Cores | 8192 (2 x 4096) | 8192 (2 x 4096) | 4096 | 2816 |
Rated Clock | 850 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1050 MHz | 930 MHz |
Texture Units | 2 x 256 | 2 x 256 | 256 | 176 |
ROP Units | 2 x 64 | 2 x 64 | 64 | 64 |
Memory | 8GB (2 x 4GB) | 8GB (2 x 4GB) | 4GB | 32GB ECC |
Memory Clock | 500 MHz | 500 MHz | 500 MHz | 5000 MHz |
Memory Interface | 4096-bit (HBM) per GPU | 4096-bit (HBM) per GPU | 4096-bit (HBM) | 512-bit |
Memory Bandwidth | 1TB/s (2 x 512GB/s) | 1TB/s (2 x 512GB/s) | 512 GB/s | 320 GB/s |
TDP | 300 watts | ? | 275 watts | 275 watts |
Peak Compute | 13.9 TFLOPS | 16 TFLOPS | 8.60 TFLOPS | 5.24 TFLOPS |
Transistor Count | 17.8B | 17.8B | 8.9B | 8.0B |
Process Tech | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
Cooling | Passive | Liquid | Liquid | Passive |
MSRP | $6000 | $1499 | $649 | $4000 |
AMD is aiming this card at datacenter and HPC users working on "big data" tasks that do not require the accuracy of double precision floating point calculations. Deep learning tasks, seismic processing, and data analytics are all examples AMD says the dual GPU card will excel at. These are all tasks that can be greatly accelerated by the massive parallel nature of a GPU but do not need to be as precise as stricter mathematics, modeling, and simulation work that depend on FP64 performance. In that respect, the FirePro S9300 x2 has only 870 GLFOPS of double precision compute performance.
Further, this card supports a GPGPU optimized Linux driver stack called GPUOpen and developers can program for it using either OpenCL (it supports OpenCL 1.2) or C++. AMD PowerTune, and the return of FP16 support are also features. AMD claims that its new dual GPU card is twice as fast as the NVIDIA Tesla M40 (1.6x the K80) and 12 times as fast as the latest Intel Xeon E5 in peak single precision floating point performance.
The double slot card is powered by two PCI-E power connectors and is rated at 300 watts. This is a bit more palatable than the triple 8-pin needed for the Radeon Pro Duo!
The FirePro S9300 x2 comes with a 3 year warranty and will be available in the second half of this year for $6000 USD. You are definitely paying a premium for the professional certifications and support. Here's hoping developers come up with some cool uses for the dual 8.9 Billion transistor GPUs and their included HBM memory!
I’m guessing “Passive”
I’m guessing “Passive” cooling should be understood as, no fan required as long as you are in a server rack which is already producing a tornado?
Yep. I think the spec sheet
Yep. I think the spec sheet said AMD recommends the chassis has aifrflow of 25cfm.
NO ECC no “PRO” version! Pro
NO ECC no “PRO” version! Pro versions need ECC memory.
HBM no has a version with ECC
HBM no has a version with ECC
Then no good for pro, unless
Then no good for pro, unless HBM gets ECC, some tasks need the fault tolerance that ECC memory provides!
Considering how ECC memory
Considering how ECC memory works, it could easily be added with an additional half-stack of HBM.
I think that’s why it is dual
I think that’s why it is dual chip card.