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For AMD’s FirePro customers, they know that with GCN coming up on 6 months old now that this is the time to keep an eye on product announcements. It typically takes AMD 6 months to a year to release a professional product using a new GPU – primarily for driver and software validation purposes – so they’re just now entering that window.

Almost right on schedule, today AMD is announcing their first Graphics Core Next based FirePro product, the FirePro W600. However in an unusual move despite the FirePro name it’s not a professional card in the traditional sense. Rather it’s a professional card in the not-for-consumers sense. GCN’s first professional task as it turns out is going to be a brand-new FirePro subcategory: digital signage and display walls.

In several respects digital signage and display walls are obvious markets for AMD. Fundamentally such functionality is based around Single Large Surface (SLS) technology, which AMD first gained in 2009 as their Eyefinity technology. Since then AMD has had the basic capabilities necessary for this market for some time now and have continued to add functions to Eyefinity over the years. At the same time they’ve even casually chased after the much broader digital signage market with embedded products like the E6760, but this is the first time they’ve gone after display walls with a dedicated part.

AMD FirePro W600 AMD FirePro V4900 AMD FirePro V3900 Stream Processors 512? 480 480 Core Clock N/A 800MHz 650MHz Memory Clock N/A 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 900MHz (1.8GHz data rate) DDR3 Memory Bus Width 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit VRAM 2GB 1GB 1GB DisplayPort Outputs 6 2 1 TDP