Firepro w8000 price: AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro

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AMD’s FirePro W SeriesIntroducing the FirePro W SeriesSetting the Scene: The Professional Graphics MarketAMD’s Plan of AttackGraphics Core Next: Compute for ProfessionalsThe Rest of the FirePro W Series Feature SetR.I.P: FireStream (2006 — 2012)More to Come, So Stay Tuned

Despite the wide range of the GPU coverage we do here at AnandTech, from reading our articles you would be hard pressed to notice that AMD and NVIDIA have product lines beyond their consumer Radeon and GeForce brands. Consumer video cards compose the bulk of all video cards shipped, the bulk of revenue booked, and since they’re targeted at a very wide audience, the bulk of all marketing attention. Consequently consumer cards also take up the bulk of the press’s attention, especially since new GPUs are almost always launched in a consumer video card first.

The truth of course is that there’s a great deal more to the GPU marketplace than consumer video cards; abutting the consumer market is the smaller, specialized, but equally important professional market that makes up the rest of the desktop GPU marketplace. Where consumers need gaming performance and video playback, professionals need compute performance, specialized rendering performance, and above all a level of product reliability and support beyond what consumers need. They need the same basic product as consumers – a high performance, feature-packed GPU – but they need to use it in entirely different ways.

As a result of these different needs the GPU marketplace is traditionally split up into three segments: consumer, professional graphics, and compute. Among these segments consumer products typically launch first, with professional and compute products following 6 to 12 months later based on further driver development and qualification needs. The end result is an interesting product cascade that sees the true, unrestricted performance of a GPU only finally unveiled several months after it launches.

This leads us to today’s product review: AMD’s FirePro W9000 video card. Having launched their Graphics Core Next architecture and the first GPUs based on it at the beginning of the year, AMD has been busy tuning and validating GCN for the professional graphics and compute markets, and that process has finally reached its end. This month AMD is launching a complete family of professional video cards, the FirePro W series, led by the flagship W9000.

AMD FirePro W Series Specification Comparison
	AMD FirePro W9000	AMD FirePro W8000	AMD FirePro W7000	AMD FirePro W5000
Stream Processors	2048	1792	1280	768
Texture Units	128	112	80	48
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Core Clock	975MHz	900MHz	950MHz	825MHz
Memory Clock	5. 5GHz GDDR5	5.5GHz GDDR5	4.8GHz GDDR5	3.2GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
VRAM	6GB	4GB	4GB	2GB
Double Precision	1/4	1/4	1/16	1/16
Transistor Count	4. 31B	4.31B	2.8B	2.8B
TDP	274W	189W	<150W	<75W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	GCN	GCN	GCN	GCN
Warranty	3-Year	3-Year	3-Year	3-Year
Launch Price	$3999	$1599	$899	$599

As always, the latest rendition of the FirePro family will be taking their place as AMD’s professional graphics card lineup. Having a dedicated professional graphics card lineup allows AMD to offer features and functionality – primarily rigorous application certification against a driver set tuned for high reliability – that while not necessary for consumer cards are critical for professional users; and of course to charge those users accordingly. FirePro also is distinct for being AMD’s only in-house video card offering, with AMD directly producing, selling, and supporting the products as opposed to farming that work out to third party partner companies (as is the case with Radeon cards).

Taking a quick look at the specifications, if you’re familiar at all with AMD’s Radeon HD 7000 series lineup, then the FirePro W series lineup should look very familiar. As with the FirePro V series and past iterations of the FirePro, the latest rendition of the FirePro family is effectively comprised of professional certified versions of existing Radeon HD 7000 series video cards, which means the hardware is nearly identical to AMD’s consumer products.

The big new with this week’s launch of course isn’t just that AMD will be replacing the 40nm FirePro V series with the 28nm FirePro W series, but that they’re doing so with Graphics Core Next, their modern compute-oriented GPU architecture. With FirePro pulling double-duty as both AMD’s professional graphics card and their compute card, this makes GCN all the more important as it brings with it potentially massive compute performance improvements that significantly shore up the V series’ weakness in compute. We’ve often said that the full power of GCN hasn’t been tapped by the consumer-oriented Radeon series, so now with FirePro we’ll finally get to see everything GCN can do.

We’ll dive into greater detail later about the individual products and their specifications, but for now we’ll offer a quick overview of the FirePro W series. Altogether the W series is to initially be composed of 4 cards, the W9000, W8000, W7000, and W5000. The former two are based around AMD’s high-end Tahiti GPU while the latter two are based around their mid-tier Pitcairn GPU, which creates a clear distinction between the two groups. Whereas Tahiti was built for both strong graphics and strong compute performance, Pitcairn is more tuned for graphics, and as FirePro products that distinction has not changed.

As a result high performance computing – particularly double precision – is going to be the domain of W8000 and W9000, along with AMD’s best graphical performance. W7000 and W5000 on the other hand still offer respectable single precision compute performance but lack the double precision performance of the larger cards, making them better suited for pure graphical workloads than for compute or compute mixed with graphics.

Moving on, much like AMD’s consumer product launch earlier this year they will enjoy a couple month lead over NVIDIA in getting 28nm cards out into the professional market.  So for the time being AMD will have a generational lead over NVIDIA’s competing products, the Fermi based Quadro series. Unlike the consumer space though the hardware upgrade pace in the professional market is much slower, so while this still gives AMD an advantage it won’t be as significant as their launch advantage in the consumer space.

On that note, when it comes to competition, pricing has been a big part of AMD’s strategy. Typically, AMD has undercut NVIDIA on pricing for equivalent professional products in order to cut into NVIDIA’s very large share of the market. Professional graphics margins are high enough that AMD can afford to sacrifice some of their margin for market share.

For the initial launch however this won’t strictly be the case, due to the fact that the Fermi Quadro series is slowly on its way out – to be replaced by the K5000 and future cards. With a SRP of $3999 for the W9000 it’s roughly as expensive as the Quadro 6000 at current prices, and the situation is similar for the $1599 W8000 compared to the Quadro 5000. Eventually NVIDIA will finish refreshing the Quadro series for Kepler, and when they do it would be reasonable to expect that AMD’s pricing will undercut NVIDIA’s new prices; the Quardo 6000 did have a launch MSRP of $4999, after all.

Finally, on a quick housekeeping note, as you may have noticed in the title we are splitting up this article into two parts. Part 1 will be focusing on the tech, the specs, and the market, while part 2 will focus on benchmarking and our performance analysis. This is so we can get the first part out at the start of this week, as opposed to holding it our extended benchmarking is complete. So if you’re looking for specific figures and performance numbers, please be sure to check back later this week for the full performance rundown.

Introducing the FirePro W Series
AMD’s FirePro W SeriesIntroducing the FirePro W SeriesSetting the Scene: The Professional Graphics MarketAMD’s Plan of AttackGraphics Core Next: Compute for ProfessionalsThe Rest of the FirePro W Series Feature SetR.I.P: FireStream (2006 — 2012)More to Come, So Stay Tuned

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FirePro W8000 [in 1 benchmark]

FirePro W8000

Buy

• Interface PCIe 3.0 x16
• Core clock speed 900 MHz
• Max video memory 4096 MB
• Memory type GDDR5
• Memory clock speed 5500 MHz
• Maximum resolution 4096×2160

Summary

AMD started FirePro W8000 sales 14 June 2012 at a recommended price of $1,599. This is a GCN 1.0 architecture desktop card based on 28 nm manufacturing process and primarily aimed at designers. 4 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.5 GHz are supplied, and together with 256 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 176 GB/s.

Compatibility-wise, this is dual-slot card attached via PCIe 3.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 279 mm. Two 6-pin power connectors are required, and power consumption is at 225 Watt.

It provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at

10.43%

of a leader’s which is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

GeForce RTX4090

Compare

General info

Some basic facts about FirePro W8000: architecture, market segment, release date etc.

Place in performance ranking	351
Value for money	6. 51
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2012−2020)
GPU code name	Tahiti
Market segment	Workstation
Release date	14 June 2012 (11 years old)
Launch price (MSRP)	$1,599
Current price	$215 (0.1x MSRP)	of 168889 (A100 PCIe 80 GB)

Value for money

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

Technical specs

FirePro W8000’s specs such as number of shaders, GPU base clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of FirePro W8000’s performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1792	of 20480 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT)
Core clock speed	900 MHz	of 2610 (Radeon RX 6500 XT)
Number of transistors	4,313 million	of 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Mobile)
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	of 4 (GeForce RTX 4080)
Power consumption (TDP)	225 Watt	of 2400 (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem)
Texture fill rate	100. 8	of 969.9 (h200 SXM5 96 GB)
Floating-point performance	3,226 gflops	of 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo)

Size and compatibility

This section provides details about the physical dimensions of FirePro W8000 and its compatibility with other computer components. This information is useful when selecting a computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards, it includes details about the interface and bus (for motherboard compatibility) and additional power connectors (for power supply compatibility).

Memory

Parameters of memory installed on FirePro W8000: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors have no dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM instead.

Video outputs and ports

Types and number of video connectors present on FirePro W8000. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference graphics cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model, while non-reference desktop models can (though not necessarily will) bear a different set of video ports.

API support

APIs supported by FirePro W8000, sometimes including their particular versions.

Benchmark performance

Synthetic benchmark performance of FirePro W8000. The combined score is measured on a 0-100 point scale.

Combined synthetic benchmark score

This is our combined benchmark performance score. We are regularly improving our combining algorithms, but if you find some perceived inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

FirePro W8000
10.43

Passmark

This is probably the most ubiquitous benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the last being done in 4K resolution if possible), and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities.

Benchmark coverage: 25%


FirePro W8000
4095

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Mining hashrates


Cryptocurrency mining performance of FirePro W8000. Usually measured in megahashes per second.




Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256)

391 Mh/s

Gaming performance


Let’s see how good FirePro W8000 is for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in frames per second. Comparisons with game system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect reality inaccurately.

Relative perfomance


Overall FirePro W8000 performance compared to nearest competitors among server video cards.

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NVIDIA Quadro K4200
105.47


AMD FirePro W7000
103.74


NVIDIA GRID M60-1Q
103.74


AMD FirePro W8000
100


NVIDIA Quadro K5000
96.93


AMD FirePro D500
96.36


NVIDIA Quadro M2000
95.97

NVIDIA equivalent


According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to FirePro W8000 is Quadro K5000, which is slower by 3% and lower by 7 positions in our ranking.

QuadroK5000

Compare


Here are some closest NVIDIA rivals to FirePro W8000:


NVIDIA Tesla K20m
105.75


NVIDIA Quadro K4200
105.47


NVIDIA GRID M60-1Q
103.74


AMD FirePro W8000
100


NVIDIA Quadro K5000
96.93


NVIDIA Quadro M2000
95.97


NVIDIA GRID M60-8Q
94.82

Similar GPUs

Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.

QuadroK5000

Compare



FirePro
D500



FireProW7000

Compare

QuadroK4200

Compare



Tesla
K20m





Tesla
K40c


Recommended processors

These processors are most commonly used with FirePro W8000 according to our statistics.



Core i5
1035G1


11.8%



A9
9425


5.9%



Core i7
8565U


5.9%



Ryzen Threadripper
PRO 5995WX


5.9%



Core i9
12900K


5.9%



Core i7
8700


5.9%



Athlon Gold
3150U


5.9%



Core i7
1165G7


5.9%



Core i5
1035G4


5.9%



A8
7680


5. 9%

User ratings: view and submit


Here you can see the user rating of the graphics card, as well as rate it yourself.

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Questions and comments


Here you can ask a question about FirePro W8000, agree or disagree with our judgements, or report an error or mismatch.

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performance overview and gaming performance tests

The FirePro W8000 graphics card was released by AMD, release date: 14 June 2012. At the time of release, the graphics card cost $1,599. The video card is designed for workstation computers and is built on the GCN 1.0 architecture, codenamed Tahiti.

Core frequency — 900 MHz. Texturing speed — 100.8 GTexel / s. Number of shader processors — 1792. Floating point performance — 3,226 gflops. Technological process — 28 nm. The number of transistors is 4,313 million. Power consumption (TDP) — 350 Watt.

Memory type: GDDR5. The maximum memory size is 4 GB. Memory bus width — 256 Bit. Memory frequency — 5500 MHz. The memory bandwidth is 176 GB / s.

Benchmarks

PassMark G3D Mark	Top 1 GPU This GPU
PassMark G2D Mark	Top 1 GPU This GPU
Geekbench OpenCL	Top 1 GPU This GPU	323189
CompuBench 1. 5 Desktop Face Detection	Top 1 GPU This GPU	1153.132 mPixels/s 64.628 mPixels/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop Bitcoin Mining	Top 1 GPU This GPU	4429.590 mHash/s 387.109 mHash/s
GFXBench 4.0 Car Chase Offscreen	Top 1 GPU This GPU	34770 Frames 7400 Frames
GFXBench 4. 0 Manhattan	Top 1 GPU This GPU	27823 Frames 3717 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 T-Rex	Top 1 GPU This GPU	69225 Frames 3357 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 Car Chase Offscreen	Top 1 GPU This GPU	34770. 000 Fps 7400.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 Manhattan	Top 1 GPU This GPU	27823.000 Fps 3717.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 T-Rex	Top 1 GPU This GPU	69225.000 Fps 3357. 000 Fps

Name	Meaning
PassMark — G3D Mark	4096
PassMark — G2D Mark	464
Geekbench — OpenCL	82941
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Face Detection	64.628 mPixels/s
CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Bitcoin Mining	387.109 mHash/s
GFXBench 4.0 — Car Chase Offscreen	7400 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan	3717 Frames
GFXBench 4. 0 — T-Rex	3357 Frames
GFXBench 4.0 — Car Chase Offscreen	7400.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan	3717.000 Fps
GFXBench 4.0 — T-Rex	3357.000 Fps

Features

Architecture	GCN 1.0
Codename	Tahiti
Production date	14 June 2012
Price at first issue date	$1,599
Ranking	365
Type	Workstation
Core frequency	900MHz
Floating point performance	3. 226 gflops
Technological process	28nm
Number of shaders	1792
Texturing speed	100.8 GTexel/s
Power consumption (TDP)	350 Watt
Number of transistors	4,313 million
Video connectors	4x DisplayPort, 1x SDI
Number of DisplayPort	4
Dual-link DVI support
StereoOutput3D
Tire	PCIe 3. 0
Form factor	Full Height / Full Length
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	279mm
Additional power connectors	2x 6-pin
DirectX	12.0 (11_1)
OpenGL	4.5
Maximum memory size	4GB
Memory bandwidth	176 GB/s
Memory bus width	256 Bit
Memory frequency	5500MHz
Memory type	GDDR5

Navigation

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FirePro W8000

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Tesla K20m

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versus

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FirePro R5000

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Radeon HD 7990

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Radeon R9 M470X

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versus

AMD
Radeon Pro WX 7100 Mobile

FirePro W8000 video card [in 1 benchmark]

FirePro W8000

• PCIe 3. 0 x16 interface
• Core frequency 900 MHz
• Video memory size 4096 MB
• Memory type GDDR5
• Memory frequency 5500 MHz
• Maximum resolution 4096×2160

Description

AMD started FirePro W8000 sales on June 14, 2012 with a suggested price of $1,599. This is a desktop video card based on the GCN 1.0 architecture and 28 nm manufacturing process, primarily aimed at designers. It has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory at 5.5 GHz, and coupled with a 256-bit interface, this creates a bandwidth of 176 Gb / s.

In terms of compatibility, this is a two-slot PCIe 3.0 x16 card. The length of the reference version is 279 mm. Two 6-pin additional power cables are required for connection, and the power consumption is 225 watts.

It provides poor performance in tests and games at the level of

10.43%

from the leader, which is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

GeForce RTX 4090

Compare

General Information

Information about the type (desktop or laptop) and architecture of the FirePro W8000, as well as when sales started and cost at that time.

90 013 6.51

Performance ranking	351
Value for money
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2012-2020)
GPU	Tahiti
Type	For workstations
Release date	June 14, 2012 (11 years ago)
Release price	$1,599 900 15
Price now	$215 (0.1x)	of 168889 (A100 PCIe 80 GB) 9001 5

Value for money

Performance to price ratio. The higher the better.

Features

FirePro W8000’s general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. They indirectly speak of FirePro W8000’s performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.

9 0013 Core clock

90 012

Number of stream processors	1792	of 20480 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT)
900MHz	of 2610 (Radeon RX 6500 XT)
Number of transistors	4.313 million	out of 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (mobile))
Technological process	28nm	of 4 (GeForce RTX 4080)
TDP	225 W	out of 2400 (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem)
Texturing speed	100.8	of 969.9 (h200 SXM5 96 GB)
07 3.226 gflops	of 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo)

Compatibility and dimensions

Information on FirePro W8000 compatibility with other computer components. Useful for example when choosing the configuration of a future computer or to upgrade an existing one. For desktop video cards, these are the interface and connection bus (compatibility with the motherboard), the physical dimensions of the video card (compatibility with the motherboard and case), additional power connectors (compatibility with the power supply).

9 0022

Bus	PCIe 3.0
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16
	Thickness	2 slots
Form factor	full height / full length
Additional power connectors	2x 6-pin

RAM

Parameters of the memory installed on the FirePro W8000 — type, size, bus, frequency and bandwidth. For video cards built into the processor that do not have their own memory, a shared part of the RAM is used.

900 13 176 Gb/s

Memory type	GDDR5
Maximum memory	4 GB	of 128 (Radeon Instinct MI250X)
Memory bus width 90 015	256bit	of 8192 (Radeon Instinct MI250X)
Memory frequency	5500 MHz	of 22400 (GeForce RTX 4080)
Memory bandwidth	of 3276 (Aldebaran)

Video outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the FirePro W8000. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference video cards, since for laptop ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model.

Video connectors	4x DisplayPort, 1x SDI
StereoOutput3D 9001 5	1
Number of DisplayPort connectors	4
Dual-link DVI support	1

API support

APIs supported by the FirePro W8000, including their versions.

DirectX	12 (11_1)
Shader Model	5.1
OpenGL	4.6 OpenCL	1.2
Vulkan	1.2. 131

Benchmark tests

These are the results of the FirePro W8000 rendering performance tests in non-gaming benchmarks. The overall score is set from 0 to 100, where 100 corresponds to the fastest video card at the moment.

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Overall benchmark performance

This is our overall performance rating. We regularly improve our algorithms, but if you find any inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in the comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

FirePro W8000
10.43

Passmark

This is a very common benchmark included in the Passmark PerformanceTest package. He gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation by running four separate tests for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the latter is done in 4K resolution if possible), and a few more tests using DirectCompute.

Benchmark coverage: 25%

FirePro W8000
4095

---

Mining hashrates

FirePro W8000 performance in cryptocurrency mining. Usually the result is measured in mhash / s — the number of millions of solutions generated by the video card in one second.

Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256)

391 Mh/s

FirePro W8000 in games

FPS in popular games on FirePro W8000, as well as compliance with system requirements. Remember that the official requirements of the developers do not always match the data of real tests.

Relative capacity

Overall performance of the FirePro W8000 compared to its closest competitor in workstation graphics cards.

---

NVIDIA Quadro K4200
105.47

AMD FirePro W7000
103.74

NVIDIA GRID M60-1Q
103.74

AMD FirePro W8000
100

NVIDIA Quadro K5000
96.93

AMD FirePro D500
96.36

NVIDIA Quadro M2000
95.97

Competitor from NVIDIA

We believe that the nearest equivalent to FirePro W8000 from NVIDIA is Quadro K5000, which is slower by 3% and lower by 7 positions in our rating on average.

Quadro K5000

Compare

Here are some of NVIDIA’s closest competitors to the FirePro W8000:

NVIDIA Tesla K20m
105.75

NVIDIA Quadro K4200
105.47

NVIDIA GRID M60-1Q
103. 74

AMD FirePro W8000
100

NVIDIA Quadro K5000
96.93

NVIDIA Quadro M2000
95.97

NVIDIA GRID M60-8Q
94.82

Other video cards

Here we recommend several video cards that are more or less similar in performance to the reviewed one.

Quadro K5000

Compare


firepro
D500


FirePro W7000

Compare


Tesla
K20m



Tesla
K40c


Recommended Processors

According to our statistics, these processors are most commonly used with the FirePro W8000.


Core i5
1035G1


11.8%


A9
9425


5.9%


Core i7
8565U


5.