Jennifer Kim
AMD announced its newest innovation, the FirePro S10000 graphics card with 12GB memory, on Nov. 14. Intended for big data applications and high-performance computing for both single and double precision performance, this new technology entails substantially easier big data applications.
According to AMD, the FirePro S10000 12GB edition, enhanced for use with the OpenCL programming language, offers full support for PCl Express 3.0 and provides DirectGMA support and ECC memory plus.
In response to consumer demands, David Cummings, senior director of Professional Graphics at AMD, announced the that FirePro S10000 12GB Edition graphics card is “to meet that additional memory demand with support for OpenCL and high-end compute and graphics technologies.” Claimed to be the world’s first “supercomputing” graphics card, the 12GB edition is designed for high-performance computing. This card will be applicable to a number of scenarios, such as use in computer and visualization servers (finance, oil exploration, automotive aeronautics, geophysics, engineering, medicine), double precision (genetic sequencing, structural mechanics, numerical analytics, reservoir simulation), and single precision (seismic processing, satellite imaging, digital rendering, medical imaging).
According to AMD, for complex operations such as double precision computing, the graphics card will be able to perform at 1.48 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS), or roughly at the level of a high-end game console. For more simple interactions, however, the FirePro S10000 can operate at a whopping 5.91 TFLOPS, more than double the prowess of the most advanced supercomputer available in 1999.
Currently, AMD’s FirePro S10000 graphics card with 6GB memory has received great recognition and praise, with its use in Frankfurt’s Institution of Advanced Studies’s SANAM supercomputer ranking in the top five on the Green500 List. With the introduction of the 12GB edition, the company is poised to confirm its spot as an essential competitor in the electronics market.
“AMD is proving again to be a key player in providing outstanding 3D graphics and GPGPU compute solutions based on the OpenCL Khronos Group standard for the industry,” said Nicolas Duny, vice president at R&D Technologies, Dassault Systemes. “The AMD FirePro S10000 12GB card will be a welcome addition to the market and to our customers.”
The release of the FirePro S10000 12GB edition is slated for Spring 2014. Though there is no announced price, the 6GB edition is available now for around $3,000, roughly $500 less than its original cost at its release.