AMD Announces FirePro S10000 GPU, Boasts Industry-leading Performance

NVIDIA isn’t the only GPU vendor to release some new workstation / server cards today, as AMD has also announced one of its own – and it sure does pack a punch. It’s called the FirePro S10000 and features two GPUs under the hood. Though it’s designed exclusively for server use, the card does include its own active cooling, a tri-fan solution. Unlike NVIDIA’s just-released Tesla K-series, AMD’s card can be used also to drive graphics. It includes one DVI and four DisplayPort connectors at the back.

In terms of throughput, AMD has NVIDIA beat. While both companies finally managed to break through the 1 TFLOP barrier for double-precision floating-point calculations, AMD leads the pack at 1.48 TFLOPs. The same sort of achievement has been seen with single-precision as well – the S10000 delivers a staggering 5.91 TFLOPs of performance there, nearly 2 full TFLOPs beyond NVIDIA’s K20X.

More comparisons can be seen below:

With NVIDIA’s latest Tesla cards offering some serious performance on their own, it’s almost amazing to see AMD come out of nowhere with a solution that takes things to the next level. With that performance boost comes a rather obvious power draw boost as well, which could limit exactly where the cards can be utilized. 

Even pricing works out to AMD’s favor. Its S10000 is set to retail for $400 more than the Tesla K20, but that premium is well-worth the performance boost. We’re talking a 12% price premium for a 67% boost to single-precision performance.

Nice work, AMD.