AMD has come across with a very interesting enterprise announcement with the introduction of new FirePro S-Series graphics cards that integrate hardware-based virtualization technology. Both FirePro S1750 and S1750 x2 are designed to work with the virtualized workstations, render farms, and cloud gaming platforms where each virtual machine has direct access to the graphics hardware.
As for the specs, both the cards use a GCN-based Tonga GPU with 2,048 stream processors paired with 8GB of ECC GDDR5 memory on the single slot FirePro S1750. The dual slot FirePro S1750 x2, as you can probably guess by the name, is a dual-GPU card that features a total of 4,096 shaders that is 2,098 per GPU and 16 GB of ECC GDDR5 that comes out to 8 GB per GPU. The S1750 has a TDP (thermal design power) of 150W while the dual-GPU S1750 x2 variant is rated at 265W and either can be passively cooled.
The technology that makes these graphics cards niche-specific is the inclusion of what AMD calls MxGPU (Multi-User GPU) technology which is derived from the SR-IOV that is Single Root Input/Output Virtualization, PCI-Express standard.
AMD claims that with the new GPU allows virtual machines direct access to the full range of GPU hardware. As for the software, there is OpenCL 2.0 support.
As for the number of users, the S1750 supports up to 16 simultaneous users and the S1750 x2 is able to take the number of users to 32. The virtualization takes place by the allocation of an equal sized slice to each machine. The size of the slice, however, gets smaller with each addition.
For error correction, the cards use ECC memory, especially when the system is dealing with very large numbers and calculations. Each VM is offered protection and isolation such that they are not able to access the data of other VMs on the graphics card.
The pricing of the cards is $2,399 for the single GPU S1750 and $3,999 for the dual GPU S1750 x2.