AMD FirePro V8800 attacks Quadro, nVidia’s profit stronghold

During last week’s event in Sunnyvale which we unfortunately could not attend, AMD gathered its partners and selected media to discuss their upcoming FirePro lineup. From the received presentations, we might conclude that AMD now definitely means business and that with Evergreen architecture of products, AMD’s FirePro team lead by Janet Matsuda is now ready to take on almost undisputed leader of professional graphics: nVidia and its Quadro line of products.

Over the next couple of months, the company will unveil a sea of new FirePro products, some of which are downright revolutionary, at least as strained executives go. But today, AMD is only unveiling FirePro V8800, as the very first member of their commercial line based on Evergreen GPU architecture. The list of features is guaranteed to cause a lot of headaches in Santa Clara.

Given that our board is currently at customs, we’ll be bringing you an in-depth review as soon as we put the product through its paces. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of most important features coming to a workstation near you.

ATI Eyefinity meets Commercial Segment: CAD, DCC
The use of multiple displays in offices of today is almost mandatory – for instance, our favorite combo for work includes a large plasma display with two Dell displays from each side. With the development of ATI Eyefinity technology, AMD made a giant step forward into the niche space occupied by low-end graphics hardware. With FirePro V8800 and similar products, AMD is now putting multi-display capability into each and every of their professional products. According to the slides we saw, AMD is going to support up to six displays at the same time with a product that will launch later this year.

For now, ATI’s Eyefinity technology on the upcoming FirePro cards supports up to four 30″ displays. The important part is that if you have a 10-bit-per-channel display, you can connect four 10 bits-per-channel displays and work in 2560×1600 on each of them. For myself personally, three displays look like a very attractive proposition.

4K Video: Only Single GPU needed
There is no easy way of putting it, but we are arriving to the age of Quad HD and 4K resolutions. In order to address that, the FirePro V8800 2GB is the first single-GPU card in the world that can drive a 4K projector screen. Two previous attempts with low-volume Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 and ASUS GTX 285 Mars never took off, and that is something AMD wants to change.

In any case, connecting the 4K display or projector is now doable with using just one FirePro card, and that deservers nothing else but praise. When our sample of V8800 clears customs, you can be sure we’ll put this feature to the test.

With the Evergreen family of products, AMD began to replace numbers with names: RV870 became Cypress, R800 became Hemlock, RV830 became Juniper and many more. The change is here to stay, and in the table below, AMD provided us with their look into how they compete against nVidia’s Quadro FX 5800 i.e. nVidia GT200B chp.

As you can see for yourself, the number of shader cores is equal to one inside the regular Cypress XT: 1600 processing cores in Vec5D arrangement clocked at 825 MHz, a 23MHz downclock when compared with HD 5870. This clock was enough to achieve 2.64 TFLOPS in Single and 532 GFLOPS in Dual-Precision mode, all IEEE 754-2008 certified. As you can calculate yourself, in Dual-Precision float, V8800 will utilize 320 of its large cores.

This represents a big step forward compared to previous RV770-based FirePro V8750, which had to endure all the limitations of RV700-series architecture. With Evergreen, AMD found new security and the company is now featuring unified driver supporting DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2/4.0, and OpenCL 1.0.

ATI FirePro V8800 2GB GDDR5: An Overview

While codenames AMD’s Consumer graphics followed legendary satire book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, AMD is now introducing its Neptune board: Cypress GL XT + 2GB GDDR5 + 4x DisplayPort. This, in a nutshell, is the part known as the FirePro V8800 2GB.

As you might have noticed, “Cypress GL XT” differs from regular consumer Cypress GPUs by marking and binning. Unlike nVidia and their Fermi products, AMD left full feature set on both commercial and consumer GPUs, thus there is no difference in Dual Precision Floating Perfomance between Radeon HD 5870 and V8800. The only difference is 28 MHz lower clock to ensure system stability for years to come.

The company paired Cypress GL XT GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Afore mentioned 2GB of GDDR5 Memory is ticking at 1.15 GHz in Quad Data Rate mode i.e. 4.6 GT/s, achieving 147.3 GB/s of memory bandwidth. On consumer HD 5870, we mostly saw Samsung GDDR5 memory and FirePro V8800 should be no different. The only major difference is quantity – as V8800 features the same-sized frame buffer memory as HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition.

What makes the difference clear between a consumer and commercial product is the presence of a Genlock/Framelock connector, located just below the “golden fingers” for dual or even quad CrossFire Pro functionality. The second major difference is the type of connectors: unlike consumer products which have to support large variety of connectors, V8800 comes with four full-sized DisplayPorts and a Stereo Sync Output. Boards should come bundled with up to four DisplayPort to DVI adapters, but do not expect orientation towards the consumers. All these changes also influenced the shape of the heatsink, which exhausts the heat by using approximately 80% of space on the second bracket.

Dethroning Quadro FX 5800
AMD also supplied us with performance charts to use as a reference point in our own testing. Given that the board unfortunately didn’t made it through Easter, we’ll just show you a table showing SPECviewPerf 10 results. We know that SPEC.org is working on SPECviewPerf 11 for quite some time now, as this benchmark doesn’t show great difference between old FirePro V8750 2GB, new V8800 2GVB and nVidia’s Quadro FX 5800 4GB.

We compared the Quadro FX 5800 to the GeForce GTX 480 and saw that in some tests, a consumer board is beating the living daylights out of the former king, thus we are intrigued in what AMD FirePro V8800 2GB can achieve. 1600 cores should give you plenty of horsepower, especially when you venture into multi-display setups.

Conclusion
When looking at the complete lineup, FirePro is now a definite player in the market and ready to attack nVidia’s 90% share in discrete boards market. The FirePro V8800 on its own brings a lot of innovations, with some that nVidia won’t be able to follow in this generation – we expect to see an answer to ATI’s Eyefinity with the Quadro SLI variant of 3D Vision Surround / nVidia Surround. It should be very exciting.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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