AMD Intros First-Ever FirePro APU for Workstations

Hot on the heels of Nvidia announcing its second-generation Kepler-based Maximus workstation platform, AMD said that it has launched the AMD FirePro A300 Series Accelerator Processing Unit (APU). The new chip is designed for entry-level and mainstream desktop workstations and features the company's AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology.

"The new AMD FirePro A300 Series APUs are designed for users who demand a high-performance computing platform to power their computer-aided design, and media and entertainment (M&E) workflows," AMD said on Tuesday. "The new AMD FirePro A300 Series APUs combine industry-certified performance and reliability for professional applications with world-class 24-hour customer support, delivering highly-tuned performance and robust feature support across a range of professional applications and tools."

According to AMD, the FirePro A300 Series APUs are its first single-chip processors capable of delivering the workstation-class visual computing performance required for today’s advanced professional environment. OEMs and workstation integrators can now create new multi-screen workstation designs that not only save space (aka out with the bulky form factor), but are energy efficient and have low heat and noise levels, perfect for secretly napping in the office, without compromising performance and reliability.

In addition to support for AMD Eyefinity Technology, the new APU series also features AMD Turbo Core tech where CPU and GPU performance are dynamically scaled depending on workload demands. The A300 Series also supports horizontal display resolutions up to 10,240 x 1600 pixels, Discrete Compute Offload (DCO) for extending GPGPU performance by throwing in extra AMD FirePro GPUs, and 30-bit color. There's also a dedicated hardware-based UVD (universal video decoder/VCE, or video CODEC engine) media encoder for faster "fixed function" GPU processing of H.264/MPEG4 files and other motion media formats.

The A300 Series will initially consist of two chips: the AMD FirePro A300 and the AMD FirePro A320. Here are the details for each:

AMD FirePro A300
TDP: 65W
CPU Cores: 4
CPU Clock (Max/Base): 4 GHz / 3.4 GHz
AMD Stream Processors: 384
GPU Clock: 760 MHz
Unlocked: No

AMD FirePro A320
TDP: 100W
CPU Cores: 4
CPU Clock (Max/Base): 4.2 GHz / 3.8 GHz
AMD Stream Processors: 384
GPU Clock: 800 MHz
Unlocked: Yes

The AMD FirePro A300 Series APUs will be available in systems from a number of workstation integrators starting in August 2012.