AMD making supercomputers more super -- FirePro S9170 GPU has 32GB GDDR5 memory

AMD is a company on the cusp of a resurgence. True, its recent financial performance has been disappointing, and it has been trailing Intel with performance, but there is a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. Its new APUs are very promising, while the recently announced Radeon 300 series and Fury X graphics cards have excited the PC gaming community.

Today, AMD announces a beast-mode level GPU that is designed for servers. The FirePro S9170 is a single-card solution that will leave those that work with high performance computing drooling. In other words, AMD is making supercomputers even more super!

"Today the best GPU for compute just got better with the introduction of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU to complement AMD's impressive array of server graphics offerings for high performance compute environments. The AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU can accelerate complex workloads in scientific computing, data analytics, or seismic processing, wielding an industry-leading 32GB of memory. We designed the new offering for supercomputers to achieve massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets", says Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group.

Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the Microelectronics Research Group at the University of Bristol says, "our new OpenCL version of the SNAP transport code from Los Alamos National Laboratory needs to keep as much data resident on the device as possible, and so the 32GB of memory will let us run problems of a much more interesting size faster than ever before. The large memory, combined with the 320GB/s memory bandwidth and double precision floating point performance, will make the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU a 'killer' solution device for many HPC applications".

AMD shares the following benefits.

• With up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance, the AMD FirePro S9170 is the fastest single-GPU server card available for DGEMM heavy workloads, delivering up to 40 percent more performance than the competitive solution
• Support for 40 percent better double precision performance, while using 10 percent less power than the competition
• The AMD FirePro S9170 is the industry's first server GPU with 32GB ultra-fast GDDR5 on-board memory and features a 512-bit memory interface for 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth
• Equipped with 32GB of GDDR5 memory, the AMD FirePro S9170 GPU can accelerate memory-intensive applications and process larger and more computationally complex workloads with ease
• The AMD FirePro S9170 GPU features 33 percent more memory than the competitive GPU, helping to improve overall workload speed and system responsiveness, especially when working with large amounts of data.

Cards like this can help supercomputers to make scientific discoveries. Quite frankly, the information produced by its processing could benefit humanity as a whole. The AMD FirePro S9170 may very well contribute to the next big thing.

What do you think of this godly card? Tell me in the comments.