So @wendell 's wet dreams finally come true sort of?
is this something you guys think you'd be able to utilize in the new office? or is premier still too rooted in CUDA? Or do you just want dedicated hardware on your machines?
In any case, I guess it's more the first cards focused on virtualization to multiple PCs? Still seems virtualization is the only thing AMD's hardware has an advantage at compared to it's competitors.
"IT budgets can realize support for up to 16 simultaneous users with a single AMD FirePro S7150 GPU card which features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, while up to twice as many simultaneous users (32 in total) can be supported by a single AMD FirePro S7150 x2 card which includes a total of 16 GB of GDDR5 memory (8GB per GPU). Both models feature 256-bit memory bandwidth."
"Nvidia offers a similar solution with its Grid virtual graphics product for businesses, but AMD's MxGPU could offer some compelling advantages over Grid in some cases. For one, S7100-series GPUs can provide OpenCL support to all virtual users without relying on pass-through mode, which dedicates the resources of an entire graphics card to a single virtual user. AMD MxGPU also doesn't rely on per-user licenses or profiles as Grid does, so system administrators are free to provision an entire S7100-series virtual graphics card among their VDI VMs as they see fit."
On the host side, MxGPU is compatible with VMWare's ESXi and vSphere solutions from version 5.5 on. AMD will support Windows 7 and 8.1 as guest operating systems, using the same graphics driver it provides for non-virtualized desktop operating systems.
Yeah, but it's not all bad. There is at least some value given by how flexible it can be. Honestly being able to branch 32 ways to different platforms simultaneously is pretty significant. Obviously this technology is not aimed at the home user, this is for large-scale corporate use. Or even academic.
Accelerated/3D graphics for VMs makes sense. This looks like a different take, as it doesn't require direct IO to an exclusive machine. I'm Quietly Excited as I use VDI (Virtual Desktop Instances) every day at work, so some extra graphical horsepower would be good.