AMD Announces next gen Fire Pro W4300

[AlTech]

 

 

With the slower release cadence for AMD’s FirePro professional cards, we tend to only hear from the FirePro group once or twice per year. And with the last update of the desktop FirePro lineup taking place back in August of 2014, the company has been due for some kind of update to their lineup to close out 2015. To that end, today the company is announcing the latest addition to the FirePro lineup, the FirePro W4300.

 

 

After last year’s more sizable refresh, today’s announcement is a lower-key update for AMD. AMD has only released one GPU in the last year, the high-end Fiji, which we’re not expecting to see released as a FirePro workstation card due to its limited 4GB of memory. Instead, today’s announcement is focused on updating the lower-end of the FirePro W lineup with a single new card to cover what AMD sees as product/performance gap in their lineup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, the W4300 will be launching with an MSRP of $379, though AMD tells us that the street price for the card is more likely to be $299. The primary competition for the W4300 will be NVIDIA’s Quadro K1200, which is based on the company’s GM107 GPU and like the W4300 is the top low-profile card in NVIDIA’s product stack. As is typically the case with the FirePro lineup, AMD is aiming to beat NVIDIA on performance for the price; at $299 the W4300 should be anywhere between 10% and 57% faster than the K1200, though it goes without saying that most gains will depend on the nature of the workload and the models being used.

 

Opinion - Awesome! Sweat. But Where is the rest of the Wx300 series? Damnit AMD! Been waiting so long for this! i don't care if you don't have enough new GPUs! Rebrand and refresh!

http://anandtech.com/show/9827/amd-announces-firepro-w4300

 

EDIT: If you were to use this for gaming then it would perform very similarly to the R7 370!

[dizmo]

I wonder how well it'll to against Nvidia's options, not only in performance, but real world adoption.

AMD needs to gain a strong foothold in the commercial/corporate space if they have any kind of hope of survival.

[Master Disaster]

...snip...

Why exactly is it Next Gen? And why are you sweating?

[Drakthorn9935]

I wanna see this card beaten to the ground with benchmarks...

[Real_PhillBert]

I've never really understood the point of half height GPU's.

 

If you need a GPU, you are probably a heavy enough user to want the cooling of a full sized cooler.

[Prysin]

I wonder how well it'll to against Nvidia's options, not only in performance, but real world adoption.

AMD needs to gain a strong foothold in the commercial/corporate space if they have any kind of hope of survival.

i'm quite excited to see how this CUDA thing works out for AMD... if it catches on, they got a HUGE "winner" on their hand. As their hardware is flat out superior to any current Quadro or even Tesla on the market. Their drivers and OpenCL reliance however, hurts their performance A LOT

[Megahurt]

Bonaire would be the same GPU as 260/260X/360, don't know how this qualifies as next gen.

[BuckGup]

This doesn't seem groundbreaking is it really that good?

[patrickjp93]

I've never really understood the point of half height GPU's.

If you need a GPU, you are probably a heavy enough user to want the cooling of a full sized cooler.

So you can slap a water block on it with 3 others and still have plenty of room for expansion cards.

[patrickjp93]

i'm quite excited to see how this CUDA thing works out for AMD... if it catches on, they got a HUGE "winner" on their hand. As their hardware is flat out superior to any current Quadro or even Tesla on the market. Their drivers and OpenCL reliance however, hurts their performance A LOT

On paper*

We have no idea who is superior until we see deployment and performance numbers.

[Prysin]

So you can slap a water block on it with 3 others and still have plenty of room for expansion cards.

you need half height to make space for the NIC's and RAID and/or PCIe based NVME expansion cards too...

[Prysin]

On paper*

We have no idea who is superior until we see deployment and performance numbers.

indeed.

however, if we assume a 90% or higher "coversion rate" with 10% or less overhead when translating from CUDA to AMDs own code. Then we can safely say that AMD got this one "in the bag".... based on raw hardware performance alone.

[patrickjp93]

you need half height to make space for the NIC's and RAID and/or PCIe based NVME expansion cards too...

You don't NEED them if you have EATX, but still, better to have and not need than need and not have, like AMD needing better compute performance.

[zMeul]

...

next gen

...

next gen ?!? they use GPUs based on GCN 1.0 and 1.1 architectures

tha' faq!?

[Real_PhillBert]

So you can slap a water block on it with 3 others and still have plenty of room for expansion cards.

 

I really doubt anyone is putting a waterblock on an entry level firepro, it's 75w... It competes with a Quadro K1200. That would be like putting a waterblock on a GTX-950.

[TheRandomness]

Bonaire would be the same GPU as 260/260X/360, don't know how this qualifies as next gen.

You said it yourself on how it qualifies for next gen... Is the R7 360 not next gen? Plus, it's a new card coming out after a pause of a year, I think they're allowed to call it next gen.

I really doubt anyone is putting a waterblock on an entry level firepro, it's 75w... It competes with a Quadro K1200. That would be like putting a waterblock on a GTX-950.

People still do it though, the statement being 'Why the hell not?'.

[AHaskin14]

That fan looks sooooo outdated but I guess if it works it works.

[patrickjp93]

I really doubt anyone is putting a waterblock on an entry level firepro, it's 75w... It competes with a Quadro K1200. That would be like putting a waterblock on a GTX-950.

He asked for the point of half-width cards in general. Now what if you were running a 10G ethernet switch, or Infiniband, or Omnipath, or several... The 980TI K|ngp|n has a half-width adapter.

[Misanthrope]

I've never really understood the point of half height GPU's.

 

If you need a GPU, you are probably a heavy enough user to want the cooling of a full sized cooler.

 

Cases like this:

 

They're actually fairly common and not only that, but business type systems nowadays actually do use matx low profile cases a lot, in fact if you've been to an office in the last 10 years you're guaranteed to see a bunch of these:

 

 

Those can easily sport a xeon and this fire pro and turn into a workstation with the same parts they already have for your average office rig.

[Real_PhillBert]

Cases like this:

They're actually fairly common and not only that, but business type systems nowadays actually do use matx low profile cases a lot, in fact if you've been to an office in the last 10 years you're guaranteed to see a bunch of these:

Those can easily sport a xeon and this fire pro and turn into a workstation with the same parts they already have for your average office rig.

I've worked in a couple offices over the last eight years or so, I can't say I have ever used a format like that.

[Misanthrope]

I've worked in a couple offices over the last eight years or so, I can't say I have ever used a format like that.

 

Not you personally but they were likely there somewhere. 

 

EDIT: Begin the question fallacy removed. The other point stands: anecdotal evidence is meaningless.

[Real_PhillBert]

Not you personally but they were likely there somewhere. Look the fact that the product exists means that AMD knows there's a market for it, how likely you think it is that they went "Good, but now make it short, cute and run hotter!"

You misunderstood, I'm not denying their existence; only questioning their value.

[Suika]

Outside of OSX, do FirePro cards have a place in the market right now? I had thought NVIDIA was basically destroying AMD in the professional market.

 

That's a genuine question, not an attack towards AMD before anybody wrongfully jumps on me.

[ShiftHitTheFan]

Outside of OSX, do FirePro cards have a place in the market right now? I had thought NVIDIA was basically destroying AMD in the professional market.

 

That's a genuine question, not an attack towards AMD before anybody wrongfully jumps on me.

Mabey? My whole college uses fire pro's for any workstation pc.

 

 

Cases like this:

 

 

They're actually fairly common and not only that, but business type systems nowadays actually do use matx low profile cases a lot, in fact if you've been to an office in the last 10 years you're guaranteed to see a bunch of these:

 

 

 

Those can easily sport a xeon and this fire pro and turn into a workstation with the same parts they already have for your average office rig.

 

Almost every non work computer at my college is in one of these with an i3 or i5. My old high school uses these cases too, but with old core 2 duos. Verry common in canada.

[HalGameGuru]

Outside of OSX, do FirePro cards have a place in the market right now? I had thought NVIDIA was basically destroying AMD in the professional market.

 

That's a genuine question, not an attack towards AMD before anybody wrongfully jumps on me.

For many different reasons nVidia has a clear advantage in compute but this is for "industrial" use. CAD, design, manufacturing, workstations, etc.