AMD Brings Competition to NVIDIA with the Introduction of 32GB FirePro S9170

AMD has a lot of powerful cards coming out that gives NVIDIA a run for its money: there's the Radeon R9 Fury X, a massive powerhouse that follows through on the promise of water-cooling, 4,096 stream processors, and high-bandwidth memory, but now we have another competitor facing NVIDIA.

Introducing AMD's FirePro S9170 professional graphics card, the first card to feature a whopping 32GB of GDDR5, far more than the previous record holder, the dual-GPU Tesla K80 (which features 24GB of RAM). According to AMD, the card is "the world's first and fastest 32GB single-GPU server card," far more than required for a typical LAN Party. The card is due for release next year sometime. Not much is known of the card, except that it boasts the second-generation Graphics Core Next GPU architecture. However, unlike the R9 Fury X, this card will lack the high-bandwidth memory.

To make specs sound even sexier, the FirePro S9170 also features 2.62 teraflops of "peak double precision performance," and 5.24 teraflops of "peak single precision performance." For those that don't have a single idea as to what a teraflop is, no worries. Here's the definition from WhatIs.com:

A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as: A trillion floating point operations per second.

The number of teraflops leaves the Tesla K40, which offers 1.66 teraflops, in the dust.

This is a 275W card that includes OpenCL 2.0 support. Though this card sounds gargantuan and pricey, there is no price to gauge its worth. However, from the sounds of it, I would guess the price tag to be at least $600, considering that AMD cards are generally cheaper than NVIDIA cards.