AMD Delivers World’s First Server GPU with Industry-Leading 32GB Memory for High Performance Compute

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia. — July 13, 2015 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the new AMD FirePro™ S9170 server GPU, the world’s first and fastest 32GB single-GPU server card for DGEMM heavy double-precision workloads, with support for OpenCL™ 2.0. Based on the second-generation AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture, this new addition to the AMD FirePro™ server GPU family is capable of delivering up to 5.24 TFLOPS of peak single precision compute performance while enabling full throughput double precision performance, providing up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance. 

Designed with compute-intensive workflows in mind, the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU is ideal for data center managers who oversee clusters within academic or government bodies, oil and gas industries, or deep neural network compute cluster development.  

 “AMD is recognized as an HPC industry innovator as the graphics provider with the top spot on the November 2014 Green500 List. 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,” said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group. “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.”

“There are some HPC workloads which require as much data as possible to stay resident on the device, and so the 32GB of memory provided by AMD FirePro S9170, the largest available on a single GPU, will enable the acceleration of scientific calculations that were previously impossible,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the Microelectronics Research Group at the University of Bristol. “For example, 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.” 

The AMD FirePro S9170 offers unparalleled GPU compute performance and power efficiency with 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% more performance than the competitive solution;

• Support for 40% better double precision performance, while using 10% 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; and

• The AMD FirePro S9170 GPU features 33% more memory than the competitive GPU, helping to improve overall workload speed and system responsiveness, especially when working with large amounts of data.

"Based on our company’s development and integration of leading-edge high-performance solutions to support design optimization, testing operation, simulation and maintenance of complex systems, SILKAN can attest that the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU is the most powerful on the market,” said François Guérinea, chairman and CEO at SILKAN. “What makes the difference is the amount of memory, and accordingly we have chosen the AMD FirePro S9170 GPU with 32GB of memory as a necessity for a client’s major project."

“By combining the new AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU with our G250 Series of 2U eight GPU systems, we are able to deliver HPC servers with up to 256GB of GPU memory,” said Alex Liu, product marketing executive of the GIGABYTE Network & Comm. Division. “This unprecedented density of GDDR5 memory will help our customers offer very attractive machines to industries processing large datasets.”

“ASUS is pleased to see the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU complement the AMD FirePro™ S9150 server GPU, the November 2014 Green500 List-winning solution,” said Robert Chin, General Manager, ASUS Server Business Unit. “We are seeing customers not only obtain significant results in the HPC arena, but also achieve power efficiency for more green environments. The arrival of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU sets a new milestone for the HPC market segment. As a top Green500 List provider and one of the greenest HPC building block providers, we’re excited to see the AMD FirePro S9170 GPU featured in our top ASUS ESC product family to enable excellent performance matched with significant savings in total cost of ownership.”

“We have been developing a fully-parallel computational tool based on the AMD GPU heterogeneous computing platform and OpenCL,” said Omid Mahahadi, co-founder and director, Geomechanica Inc. “This tool accurately captures the complex physics of massive mines plus oil and gas fields rapidly and reliably. Thanks to the impressive 32GB of memory of the new cards, we expect to run computations on massive data structures containing tens of millions of data elements. The combination of rapid double-precision operations with the large memory capacity enables accurate, detailed, and reliable computations. A similar performance using CPUs would likely require much higher capital and maintenance costs. Moving forward, we plan to take advantage of the recent features of the OpenCL 2.0 open API to further enhance the performance of our software.”

To address future needs for HPC development, AMD FirePro™ S9170 server GPU supports the latest version of OpenCL™ while ready for the OpenMP and OpenACC developer tools with planned availability in Q3 2015.