nMP FirePro Dxxx clocks and TDP

[Pressure]

They don't use ECC memory, just regular GDDR5. There's no ECC tables in these vbioses.

Which also helps explain the cheap prices!

 

[slughead]

They don't use ECC memory, just regular GDDR5. There's no ECC tables in these vbioses.

Does that mean these are still "workstation cards"? When can we start comparing the price/performance to 7970's?

 

[Cubemmal]

Does that mean these are still "workstation cards"? When can we start comparing the price/performance to 7970's?

I believe that ECC RAM is optional in workstation cards, so the non-presence of it does not indicate whether this is one or not. Again, the main thing indicating Fire Pro is an software, not the hardware.

 

[slughead]

I believe that ECC RAM is optional in workstation cards, so the non-presence of it does not indicate whether this is one or not. Again, the main thing indicating Fire Pro is an software, not the hardware.

Fair enough. The W8000 and W9000 both have ECC though (W7000 does not). When making direct comparisons between the W9000 and D700, that should be taken into account. ECC is actually necessary for many professional use-cases.

 

[ZnU]

Fair enough. The W8000 and W9000 both have ECC though (W7000 does not). When making direct comparisons between the W9000 and D700, that should be taken into account. ECC is actually necessary for many professional use-cases.

But mostly in e.g. scientific computing applications, not the sort of apps creative pros run.

The Mac has traditionally been somewhat popular in some segments in the sciences, but this has been a comparatively small market for Apple, and a lot of the computational heavy lifting in that world has moved to clusters and/or cloud services now.

 

[deconstruct60]

Ok, I get it. So another question: what exactly do the flops number of these cards mean?

FLoating point Operations Per Second. Basically math operations per second. 2 Tera FLOPS (TFLOPs0 is 2 trillion math operations per second. It is quite significantly high. Take 4 trillion numbers and add them. Done, one second flat.

One (me) would think based on the published numbers (2 vs. 2.2) that the performance difference between the D300 and D500 would not be very great.

There is a gap in VRAM size. If the problems are 'too big" for the D300 than even the marginal increase of the D500 is significant. Likewise if need ECC support

if switch to double precision numbers the gap is quite large between the D300 and D500 .

----------

They don't use ECC memory, just regular GDDR5. There's no ECC tables in these vbioses.

None of the AMD powered cards use ECC memory. The ECC support is layered on top of regularly VRAM by the GPUs memory controller. They all use regular GDDR5. They would need more VRAM to store the additional checksum data.

If Apple has permanently disabled the ECC capability then are going to run into big time problems with their

"... Use OpenCL to incorporate advanced numerical and data analytics features, perform cutting-edge image and media processing, and deliver accurate physics simulations. ... "

marketing campaign. Lack of ECC is a joke for anyone with individual data points that are actually worth something.

Long term, it isn't going to help them by flushing "FirePro" features down the drain while still slapping a large price premium on the cards.

 

[deconstruct60]

But mostly in e.g. scientific computing applications, not the sort of apps creative pros run.

Individual pixels are not worth much. At 4K resolutions not even likely anyone will find "blt flipped" ones.

The Mac has traditionally been somewhat popular in some segments in the sciences, but this has been a comparatively small market for Apple,

The Mac Pro is a small market for Apple. Making it smaller by narrowing the usefulness of the Mac Pro to a very narrow media ghetto is likely going to lead to problems long term. The scientific market probably isn't that relatively small to the Mac Pro. Apple probably wouldn't be mentioning it in the limited space on their marketing places if "nobody" in that segment is looking at Mac Pro options.


It would be one thing if Apple had to do extra engineering to create ECC capability. it is already there. Flushing it down the drain does what that is beneficial long term?

and a lot of the computational heavy lifting in that world has moved to clusters and/or cloud services now.

Lots of trial, limited runs are done before folks ship stuff off to clusters. Clusters that have some "heft" to them cost money to run on. Doing iterative initial exploration is quite often more cost effective on more personal workstation before shipping long running computations off the "batch job" cluster.

 

[666sheep]

None of the AMD powered cards use ECC memory. The ECC support is layered on top of regularly VRAM by the GPUs memory controller. They all use regular GDDR5. They would need more VRAM to store the additional checksum data.

Thanks for clarification. I'll try to dig some more in ROMs then.