The AMD FirePro W9000 & W8000 Review: Part 1
by Ryan Smith on August 14, 2012 4:00 AM ESTThe Rest of the FirePro W Series Feature Set
So far we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the FirePro W series in reference to AMD’s GCN architecture. Without question GCN is the single biggest change coming from AMD’s past products, but GCN is but one component of the Southern Islands family of GPUs that are the underpinning of this generation of AMD GPU products. Much like we’ve already seen on the desktop side of things there are a number of additional features Southern Islands brings with it that have some specific relevance in the professional graphics market.
Perhaps the single biggest improvement is that Southern Islands finally introduces full Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory support. In prior generations of GPUs AMD did not have any ECC support, with the closest thing being Error Detection & Correction (EDC), which could detect errors introduces across the memory bus (a very real concern with high-speed GDDR5) but no other type of errors. This admittedly isn’t a huge concern for the graphics workloads that past generations of FirePro specialized in, but moving forward for compute workloads it’s a critical feature due to the impact of errors.
So starting with the FirePro W series AMD will have full ECC support in selected models. This will include both ECC for internal SRAM caches (which is actually a free operation), and ECC for the external VRAM (accomplished through the use of a virtual ECC scheme). This functionality is going to be limited to products based on the Tahiti GPU, which means the W9000 and W8000. As Tahiti is AMD’s only GPU specifically configured for maximum compute performance, this comes as no great surprise. Consequently, the Pitcarin based W7000 and W5000 will have no such ECC support, mirroring their lower compute performance and emphasis on graphics.
Moving on, it came as a bit of a surprise to see AMD tout their Partially Resident Texture technology as a FirePro feature. We’re accustomed to thinking of PRT as a gaming technology – particularly due to the id Software Megatexture technology – but AMD tells us that it should be applicable to any kind of application using a large data set. More importantly however is the fact that since PRT can only be accessed under OpenGL right now, it’s far more accessible to professional graphics applications (which almost exclusively use OpenGL) as opposed to games and their heavy reliance on Direct3D. In any case we aren’t going to go into great detail about this technology since we’ve covered it before, but it should be interesting to see if AMD’s predictions are right.
Meanwhile, PowerTune marks its return on the FirePro W series. PowerTune, as you may recall, is AMD’s power throttling technology which is responsible for reining in on video card power consumption to keep it below a desired level. AMD has had PowerTune since the last-generation Cayman GPU, but it was only available on that GPU, meaning it wasn’t available on AMD’s top-tier FirePro cards such as the V9800. With The FirePro W series it’s finally available across AMD’s entire lineup, marking the first time it’s available to products like the W7000 and W5000. Given the latter’s sub-75W TDP, PowerTune is going to play an especially important role in making that possible.
Also seeing its introduction in Southern Islands and by extension the FirePro W series is PCI-Express 3.0 support. PCIe 3.0 doubles the effective transfer rate for a PCIe x16 slot to 16GB/sec in each direction, up from 8GB/sec in PCIe 2.0. This won’t make much of a difference for graphics workloads since they rarely consume 8GB/sec in the first place, but for compute workloads this is a critical feature. Any compute workloads that need to constantly send large amounts of data back and forth between the CPU and GPU should significantly benefit from this.
Finally, in another unexpected feature mention within AMD’s marketing materials, AMD is taking the time to mention their Video Codec Engine (VCE) hardware H.264 encoder, which was also introduced in Southern Islands. Both AMD and NVIDIA have been taking the time to mention their hardware video encoders in their respective professional graphics cards, which is unexpected given the fact that these hardware encoders are primarily intended for consumer uses such as quick video transcoding and video conferencing; neither encoder is up to the task of broadcast/archival quality video. Nevertheless, while neither company seems to have a solid idea of what to do with the hardware in the professional market, they’re throwing it out there in order to see what their customers can come up with.
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johnthacker - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
The W7000 has some uses in specific situations, but that's because it's a single slot card. Single slot Radeon HD 7850s (much less 7870s), which also use Pitcairn, are difficult to find; there was one OEM that showed off a design IIRC. Other than that it's hard to see exactly when someone would want these cards.The same generally holds for NVIDIA (the Fermi Quadro cards are cut down GF100 based, so they can be better at compute than their gaming numbers suggest, and the old Quadro 4000 is a single slot card.) Interesting that NVIDIA so far is trying to reserve GK110 for Quadro and Kepler only. We'll see if that works.
Dribble - Tuesday, August 14, 2012 - link
AMD doesn't need to provide compatible, they need to provide better.Bottom line is companies won't change gpu manufacturer. Nvidia works well, has traditionally worked better then AMD and they still have much better driver support (team is much bigger).
There are no AMD fanboys routing for the underdog, you have to provide a clear business reason to change, and "we're almost as good as nvidia in sometimes" isn't it.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Compute baby ! amd compute ! compute ! GPGPU ! amd wins! amd wins!(that's all I've heard since 7000 series)
Hey, winzip man.
Pixelpusher6 - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 - link
I really have to question AMD's move here to kill off Firestream and have the FirePro line serve both markets. At the present time this is where they have an advantage on Nvidia. 1TB double precision performance is pretty good even though its only 1/4 of single precision, even clocked low enough to be passively cooled it should still beat Nvidia's best compute card. K10 is not really a compute card at all and to me it seems like they just wanted to get something, anything out until K20. And K20 is by no means a certainty for Q4 2012, my guess is it will be delayed. I just don't have confidence in Nvidia's mastering of the 28nm process yet, especially given the enormous die size of this chip which I've heard presents some unique challenges. And when K20 does come out it will probably be more expensive than their current compute cards.If I were AMD I would re-brand the compute card, drop the Firestream name because of it's association with VLIW, and come out with a new brand to highlight what really makes up GCN...Compute. Does anyone know if HPC clusters use actively cooled cards or only passively cooled? I was under the impression that compute cards generally were clocked a little lower but passively cooled. If that is the case then that rules out using the FirePro W9000 and W8000 in these server clusters. It seems like AMD just conceded this market completely when they finally have a competitive compute GPU to gain a foothold. As someone else noted this market will only be expanding. If AMD wants to only focus on professional graphics I sure hope their drivers will be better than the consumer counterparts.
dtolios - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 - link
When will AMD start improving compatibility with VRay RT and other similar OpenCL apps? All this computational potential remains unused outside benchmarks - at least for the CG world.Radeons are vastly better in OpenGL than GeForce cards, so the switch to FirePro's is way less "mandatory" for such apps. But even if those driver issues were solved, AMD would secure a huge increase of share in the professional CG market which now uses nVidia (yes, mostly gaming cards) almost exclusively.
AG@FirePro - Monday, August 27, 2012 - link
You might imagine that it's in AMD's best interest to work very closely with all the important ISVs in this space - and you would be right! :) Helping our technology partners and the broader software development community implement open-standards-based GPU acceleration in their applications is an area of heavy onging investment for us.Of course, not all apps are written the same. Some applications -especially those written in years past- are architected in a way that makes it challenging to enable the best performance across all the modern GPU options on the market. Proprietary or "hybrid" codebases often make full cross-compatibility quite difficult. can assure you that neither ISVs nor end-users want their toolsets be tied to a particular hardware vendor or proprietary technology base. Unfortunately, it's not always as easy as flipping a switch and sometimes this takes a while. This said, I think it's fair to say that our aim is that very soon, everybody will have the option to run the hardware of their choice in conjunction with their favorite realtime raytracer, physics solver or any other hardware-accelerated toolset.
AMD FirePro cards fully support OpenCL in both hardware and software. Our devices offer certified and acknowledged compatibility and killer performance for a broad range of OpenCL-based applications. The same is true for tons of applications accelerated under OpenGL, DirectX and DirectCompute APIs. Compatibility and reliability are crucial. Nobody understands this more than us.
To this end, we continue to be closely aligned with all the key ISVs in the M&E, DCC and CAD space to help them provide maximum flexibility, choice and value for their end-users.We also continue to refine and expand our range of developer tools (profilers, compliers, debuggers, etc) while at the same time contributing heavily to the open-source community in the form of optimized libraries and other free developer resources.
The OpenCL story gets better every day. Every day, there are new and better OpenCL libraries being written and shared. There are new compiler optimizations being made all the time which allow for faster andmore flexible implementations. More and more software devs are liberating their code and their customers from proprietary APIs. While CUDA-bound apps still provide lots of value for many end-users, the writing is clearly on the wall. The age of proprietary GPU acceleration has begun to yield to a new reality of flexibility and choice for consumers.
This is a good thing, no?
*PS* You may have noticed an announcement about certain new server-side GCN-based FirePro GPU offerings today. Stay tuned. Things are about to get seriously fun up in here.
Adam G.
AMD FirePro Team
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
It's not a good thing because it has not happened, and it doesn't appear it will even in the next decade.It's still proprietary, and is not cross card company compatible, so it's all crap talk.
As we saw amd do after their years of PR bashing, WinZip PROPRIETARY.
It's gonna be all seriously vendor specific up in there for a long, long time.
warpuck - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Does this mean I wont need 2 PCs? one for games and another for graphics. I did notice what appears to be a crossfire connector. I know most companies would not go for PC configuration like that, unless it was in the boss's office. I am one of those independants. I like taking a break when I feel like it. Not having 2 PCs would simplify things for me.peevee - Friday, August 24, 2012 - link
OK, "later this week"? In the review written 8/14. "This" week ended, then "next" week ends today...Death666Angel - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 - link
Hey!No problem about the inconsistent data, but maybe you can present it in a more accurate way? Currently the interval of the X axis is not to scale and the line through the data points makes it seem as though you know the way it progressed in between the data points. I'd rather make a simple bar chart with the intervals showing correctly. It would be a more honest and easy to read diagram. :)
Great article though! :D