AMD Tonga makes its debut in the Firepro W7100

At the Siggraph conference, AMD introduces a bunch of new graphics cards in the Firepro W series, which, unlike the Radeon, are intended for professional users. It includes everything from CAD and media production to compute and virtualization. One of the newcomers is the Firepro W7100, which is apparently based on the new graphics processor AMD Tonga.

AMD Firepro W7100 with the Tonga graphics circuit

What makes the launch particularly interesting is that Tonga will soon also appear in the upcoming Radeon R9 285 series. In practice, the new graphics processor will replace the aging Tahiti, which was already introduced with the Radeon HD 7900 series in late 2011 and is now used in the Radeon R9 280 (X).

Like Hawaii for the Radeon R9 290 series, Tonga is based on the latest revision of the Graphics Core Next architecture with the ability to calculate four triangles per clock cycle – double up from GCN 1.0. This is due to 1,792 stream processors divided into 28 clusters, but there are many indications that the full version of the circuit consists of 32 clusters with a total of 2,048 computing units.

Another difference is that Tonga goes down to the 256-bit memory bus, something that can be at least partially compensated with higher clock frequencies. Compared to Tahiti and Hawaii, there is also less L2 cache, but at the same time it may well be that the Firepro W7100 contains a scaled-down version of the circuit.

Last but not least, AMD takes the opportunity to update the multimedia functionality in UVD, where, among other things, support for sound acceleration with Trueaudio is added. Tonga will also be able to encode 4K-resolution video in the formats H.264, VC-1, MPEG4, MPEG2 and now also MJPEG.

In the consumer market, AMD Tonga is introduced in the Radeon R9 285 series, which apparently will be launched at the end of August.

Source: Hardware.fr, Techreport.