AMD announces HPC card with two Fiji GPUs

AMD has announced the FirePro S9300 X2. This high-performance computing accelerator card is built around two Fiji GPUs, much like the Radeon Pro that AMD announced in mid-March.

The FirePro S9300 X2 is primarily aimed at applications where single-precision calculations are required. AMD cites neural networks and machine learning as examples, as well as geoscience applications such as processing seismic data. These are areas where fp32 or even fp16 calculations are the main focus. The new FirePro offers fp32 computing power of 13.9tflops.

In double-precision computing, the FirePro S9300 X2 loses out to other current HPC cards, a result of the use of the Fiji GPUs, which were developed for video cards. With fp64 computing power of 0.8tflops, the S9300 X2 is on par with the 2012 S9000.

A memory amount of twice 4GB is also little for an HPC card, but thanks to the use of high bandwidth memory in combination with the memory bus of two times 4096 bits wide, the total bandwidth is 1TB/s.

The FirePro S9300 X2 thus occupies a specific position in AMD’s FirePro S line of data center cards, just like the Radeon Pro does in the graphics card market. AMD can achieve higher margins than with that card for VR purposes: the company charges $5999 for the card.