Review: Sapphire FirePro W9100

Introduction

AMD is most commonly known as the provider of consumer Radeon GPUs and a wide range of APUs and CPUs for mainstream and enthusiast PC desktops and laptops. But just like rival Nvidia, AMD has a professional range of graphics cards designed for the workstation market.

Such graphics cards are known as FirePro and are based on very similar architectures to their consumer Radeon cousins, but they're different insofar as the software is validated for applications used in the fields of compute, life sciences, engineering and design.

The professional nature of the intended market means people are willing to pay for the privilege of enhanced reliability, and it's an area that AMD, right now, is underrepresented in. Latest research indicates that Nvidia has an 75 per cent market share leaving just 25 per cent to AMD.

These types of cards are sold within workstations built by the likes of Dell, HP, Apple and a whole host of smaller SIs - this is how Nvidia gets so much traction - and also separately as in-place upgrades over older technology. Speaking numbers, Q3 2014, for example, saw just over a million GPU-equipped workstations sold while AMD and Nvidia claimed a total 1.26m shipments - meaning 250,000 cards were purchased from the channel.

AMD's workstation cards are split into two broad camps based on underlying architecture. The Wx100 range uses various GPUs based on the GCN 1.1 blueprint while Wx000 harness GCN 1.0. Here's a brief table outlining the current stack.

FirePro Wx00 series

The older FirePro cards' specifications will be familiar to any enthusiast who purchased a Radeon card in the last three years. Based on the same architecture that powered the Radeon HD 7970, HD 7950, HD 7870, and so forth, AMD naturally repurposed the GPUs for professional usage.

Clock speeds remain similar to their desktop counterparts, as does single- and double-precision support. The obvious telltale sign that some are architectured for workstation usage is gleaned from the extra onboard memory, provision for ECC support for enhanced error checking, and a wide range of outputs. The Wx000 series still exist today but have been largely superseded by the Wx100.

FirePro Wx100 series

The codenames provide meaningful insight into the provenance of the newer FirePro GPUs. Focussing on the two premier cards based on the same architecture that propels the Radeon R9 290(X), AMD has used the same tack to differentiate these graphics goliaths.

Though the specifications do appear to be very similar on first perusal, AMD has used the fullest computational ability for FirePro by improving the double-precision binary support by a factor of 4x. Useful for when calculations need supreme accuracy, the top-end FirePros run double-precision at half the single-precision speed.

There's more memory, too, for the larger datasets common to the professional market, and both high-end W-series GPUs, like their predecessors, offer ECC support as standard. Six mini DisplayPort connectors can drive six 4K panels at once without the need for any additional hubs or adapters, which is a first for the workstation market. Do be aware that running six limits the refresh to 30Hz; three can run at a full, preferred 60Hz.

Going for the cream of the crop, we have the W9100 in for review today. So let's take a look at what constitutes AMD's best-ever professional graphics card.