We've often seen in science fiction movies that advertising and other signage is no longer just a static image. No more posters or billboards, but rather everything is animated on a giant, backlit display.
We saw it first in sci-fi, but it's becoming a reality now, and AMD today announced a new graphics card that will help that along even further with the FirePro W600 professional graphics card.
The FirePro W600 is AMD's first professional graphics card to utilize the Graphics Core Next architecture and 28nm production technology. With this launch, AMD is targeting multi-screen display wall environments and large, dynamic screens that are easily updated with new content.
“Whether we are checking flight times at the airport or watching the latest ads on massive screens in city squares, digital signage has quickly become an important and ubiquitous part of our lives,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics.
Digital signage is now growing beyond just a single display and to multiple screens stitched together to create one larger image. Those who associate AMD's graphics with technologies such as Eyefinity will know how this will apply to the signage market. Smaller and cheaper LCDs can be combined to create a very high resolution wall that replaces an older, low-res giant screen.
Besides the usual Eyefinity 6 configurations that we know and love (the 3x2), now all six displays can be lined up side by side in a row or stacked on top of one another in a column. Perhaps even more exciting is that the card can output to a projector that can stitch together all six images without worry of bezels getting in the way, as projected images don't have to worry about that. The resolution supported should scale well to large formats as well, going all the way up to 4096x2304 per display. Later this year, AMD will also add support for projection edge blending and image warping.
The card will be priced at $599 and will pack 2GB of GDDR5 graphics memory. It will support two HD video streams via AMD’s Unified Video Decoder.
It being part of AMD's 28nm family, the FirePro W600 also has PowerTune technology that dynamically optimizes power consumption during operation and ZeroCore Power technology that reduces power consumption at idle and turns fans off for silent operation. At the max, the W600 is a 75W part.
At this rate, it won't be long before we'll be experiencing sensory overload just from just from digital signage.
