AMD FirePro W600 Paves Way for Six x 4K 'Display Walls'

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.

Read more from @MarcusYam on Twitter.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • Darkerson
    Not bad considering what it will be used for. Go AMD!
    Reply
  • nikorr
    I like it.
    Reply
  • AznCracker
    and only 599. was expecting more for a commercial product
    Reply
  • archange
    2 GB for 6 x 4k displays may be cutting it short.
    Reply
  • Robert Pankiw
    Archange, more than likely, the images being generated will be highly compressible, and more than that, pre-rendered, since it is meant for things like "menus" and "billboards".
    Reply
  • silverblue
    Besides which, even using triple buffering that'd only equate to 162MB of VRAM. 1.8GB left to play around with.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    ... that is the equivilant of running 24 1080p screens off of a single card that only costs $600, and eats only 75W. I think it is safe to say that this ought to put the final nail in the coffin for companies like Matrox who have traditionally ruled the multi display market. There is simply no competing with this.

    All we need now is to put some ram and processing power behind it so that it can support full video, or something more complicated than simple animations.
    Reply
  • randomkid
    75 watts only? That sounds ideal...
    Reply
  • alphaalphaalpha1
    75w, so no PCIe power connector is needed? That means that it's probably similar to a 7770 2GB, just with a slightly lower TDP, so it might have a slightly lower voltage and/or binning or if not better binned, then possibly clocked lower. It could be very useful for a lot of things.

    caedenv... that is the equivilant of running 24 1080p screens off of a single card that only costs $600, and eats only 75W. I think it is safe to say that this ought to put the final nail in the coffin for companies like Matrox who have traditionally ruled the multi display market. There is simply no competing with this.All we need now is to put some ram and processing power behind it so that it can support full video, or something more complicated than simple animations.
    Six 4096x2304 displays is a 56.6MP aggregate resolution and twenty-four 1080p displays is a 49.7MP aggregate resolution. This card's max is closer to twenty-seven 1080p displays' worth of pixels. Also, there will be more powerful cards than it. This is simply a low end and more affordable card for very high resolutions for non-intensive purposes.
    Reply
  • EDVINASM
    Strange no one is wondering whether it will run Crysis.. :) Am surprised it comes with only 2GB of RAM.
    Reply