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AMD doesn’t strictly adhere to a small-die strategy (300-400mm2 is now their sweet spot), but they also don’t build 500mm2+ behemoths like NVIDIA. GCN gives AMD a very potent compute architecture that is unquestionably competitive with Fermi and little Kepler, but there’s one thing NVIDIA will do that AMD won’t: build it big. The other limitation for AMD in this arena was of course their GPUs.

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For the FirePro V series AMD does have both active and passive cooled FirePro cards, however the FireStream cards were only available with passive cooling. Furthermore NVIDIA went and developed a couple different lines of Tesla cards, branching out into both traditional self-cooled cards for workstations and servers, and purely passive cards meant for specialized rackmount servers.

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Chief among these was a compute-focused driver for Windows (NVIDIA calls it TCC), which stripped away all of the graphics capabilities of the card in order improve compute performance by freeing it from the control of the Windows display driver subsystem. NVIDIA’s Tesla business is still a fledging business – it’s grown by leaps and bounds since 2010, but not as much as NVIDIA would like – but even so the company has created several distinctions between Tesla and Quadro that AMD never did replicate with FireStream. Meanwhile FireStream as a brand hasn’t kept up with NVIDIA’s Tesla business in the dedicated compute market. And AMD is right – by all accounts the FireStream 9300 series did very little to differentiate itself from the equivalent FirePro cards. AMD’s FireStream cards were nearly identical to their FirePro cards in both build and performance, with the only practical difference being that FireStream cards had most of their display connectors removed.

So why is AMD choosing now to discontinue the FireStream family at this point in time? Officially, AMD believes the FireStream family to be redundant.

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From here on the FirePro family will officially be pulling double-duty as both AMD’s professional graphics product and AMD’s compute product. Starting with the launch of the FirePro W series the FireStream family of products is being discontinued entirely.

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In any case, with the release of GCN and its significant compute enhancements we have been expecting a major update to the FireStream product family. Nevertheless, as we found out after the fact with the launch of GCN, major users weren’t interested in moving to VLIW4, almost certainly having early knowledge that VLIW4 would be a dead-end architecture to be replaced by GCN in 2012. While VLIW4 is not the kind of superior compute architecture that GCN is, it was still fundamentally designed to improve AMD’s compute performance, which it did thanks to the use of narrower SIMDs that allowed for a partial shift away from ILP to TLP. Since then AMD ended up choosing to skip a 2011 refresh of the product based on their Cayman (VLIW4) GPU, which was a somewhat odd move at the time.

The most recent refresh of the product was the release of the FireStream 9300 series in 2010, which saw the FireStream family move to AMD’s first meaningfully capable OpenCL GPU, the RV870. Since 2006 AMD has regularly updated the product line, releasing new cards based on the RV670, RV770, and RV870 GPUs. Initially launched in 2006 and based on AMD’s R580 GPU, the FireStream was AMD’s first product geared exclusively towards GPU computing. All of AMD’s product lines are benefiting from GCN… all of them but one: FireStream.įor those of you not familiar with FireStream, FireStream is (or rather was) AMD’s line of dedicated GPU compute products.

Consumer compute has already benefitted through the Radeon HD 7000 series, while professional graphics will begin benefiting with the FirePro W series, and GCN will be laying the foundation for the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) in 2014.

It goes without saying that with GCN AMD has significantly improved their GPU compute capabilities across the board.

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