AMD FirePro

AMD FirePro
Design firm Advanced Micro Devices
Type Professional workstations

AMD FirePro is AMD's brand of graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC) applications. The GPU chips on FirePro-branded graphics cards are identical to the ones used on Radeon-branded graphics cards. The end products (i.e. the graphics card) differentiate substantially by the provided graphics device drivers and through the available professional support for the software.

Competitors include Nvidia's Quadro-branded and to some extent Tesla-branded product series and Intel's Xeon Phi-branded products.

Products

Multi-monitor support

Main article: AMD Eyefinity

AMD Eyefinity supports multi-monitor set-ups. One graphics card can drive up to a maximum of six monitors; the supported number depends on the distinct product and the number of DisplayPort displays. The device driver facilitates the configuration of diverse display group modes.

Differences with the Radeon Line

The user-mode drivers as well as the kernel-mode drivers for AMD FirePro products have additional features, and also (not depicted here) additional interfaces.[1]

The FirePro line is designed for multimedia content creation programs (such as video editors) and mechanical engineering design software (such as CAD programs). Their Radeon counterparts are suited towards video games and other consumer applications. Because they use the same drivers (Catalyst) and are based on the same architectures and chipsets, the differences are essentially limited to price and double-precision performance. FirePro cards may also have some features enabled that are not available on an equivalent Radeon card.

Since the 2007 series, high-end and ultra-end FireGL/FirePro products (based on the R600 architecture) have officially implemented stream processing, which the Radeon line of video cards, although present in hardware, did not offer any support until the HD 4000 series where beta level OpenCL 1.0 support is offered, and the HD 5000 series and later, where full OpenCL 1.1 support is offered.

Heterogeneous System Architecture

HSA is intended to facilitate the programming for stream processing and/or GPGPU in combination with CPUs and DSPs. All models implementing the Graphics Core Next microarchitecture support hardware features defined by the HSA Foundation and AMD has provided corresponding software.


FirePro DirectGMA

AMD DirectGMA is a feature usable with AMD FirePro products.


Soft-mods

Because of the similarities between FireGL and Radeon cards, some users soft-mod their Radeon cards by using third-party software or automated scripts accompanied with a modified FireGL driver patch, to enable FireGL capabilities for their hardware, effectively getting a cheaper, equivalent, FireGL cards, often with better OpenGL capabilities, but usually half of the amount of video memory. Some variants can also be soft-modded to a FireStream stream processor.

The trend of soft-mods continued with the 2007 series FireGL cards, as follows:

Radeon product GPU Corresponding FireGL soft-mod
Radeon HD 2900 XT (1 GB GDDR4 version) R600 XT FireGL V8600
Radeon HD 2900 GT R600 GT FireGL V7600
Radeon HD 2600 XT (512 MB GDDR4 version) RV630 XT FireGL V5600
Radeon HD 2600 Pro RV630 Pro FireGL V3600
Radeon HD 3850/3870 RV670 FireGL V77001 / FireStream 9170
Radeon HD 4870 RV770 FirePro V8700
*1 Radeon HD 3850/3870 products do not have the DisplayPort output presented on FireGL V7700 product.

List of pre-ATI FireGL cards

Year Manufacturer Model Chipset Memory (RAM) Bus Type
1995[2] SPEA FireGL 3Dlabs GLINT 300SX + S3 86C968/86c868 8 MB VRAM + 8-12 MB DRAM
Diamond FireGL 1000 3DLabs Permedia + GLint Delta 4/8 MB
Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro 3DLabs Permedia 2 4/8 MB
Diamond FireGL 2000 3Dlabs GLINT 300SX + S3 86C968/86c868 8 MB VRAM + 8-12 MB DRAM
Diamond FireGL 3000 3Dlabs Glint 500TX + Glint Delta 8 MB VRAM+ 8/16/32 MB
Diamond FireGL 4000 Mitsubishi 3Dpro/2MP 15 3D RAM/ 4-16 CDRAM
Diamond FireGL 5000 Mitsubishi iMPAC-GE
Diamond FireGL 1 IBM Oasis Rasterizer 32 MB AGP 2x
Diamond FireGL 2 IBM RC1000 (120 MHz) + GT1000 (190 MHz) 64 MB DDR (120 MHz) AGP 4x
Diamond FireGL 3 IBM RC1000 (120 MHz) + GT1000 (190 MHz) 128 MB DDR (120 MHz) AGP 4x Pro
Diamond FireGL 4 IBM RC1000 (150 MHz) + GT1000 (205 MHz) 128 MB DDR (150 MHz) AGP 4x Pro

History

The FireGL line was originally developed by the German company Spea Software AG until it was acquired by Diamond Multimedia in late 1995.[3] The first FireGL board used the 3Dlabs GLINT 3D processor chip.[4]

Deprecated brand names are ATI FireGL and ATI FirePro 3D.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "XDC2014 Alex Deucher: Linux drivers".
  2. ↑ "GLINT05 SPEA FireGL".
  3. ↑ "Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. Completes Acquisition of Spea Software AG".
  4. ↑ 1996 press release from 3Dlabs

External links

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