AMD, Nvidia in pro GPU battle

Rival chip designers AMD and Nvidia continue to fight for dominance in the professional graphics processor market. Here's a summary of what's gone down this week:

• AMD is cooking up a Radeon Solid State Graphics (SSG) card that has 1TB of M.2 flash memory. It'll be powerful enough to scrub through 8K video at 90 frames per second, we're told. It's aimed at pros processing large amounts of material at once, such as high-res videos, complex scenes and models, scientific data, and so on. A developer kit costs $9,999 and you can ask nicely for one now, or wait for general availability in 2017.
• AMD has open-sourced its FireRender software under a new name: Radeon ProRender. This is built on OpenCL and is used to produce photorealistic renderings. It plugs into 3DS Max, Maya, Rhinoceros and Solidworks tools.
• Nvidia is touting the new Quadro P6000, designed for workstations. It features 3,840 Pascal cores, 24GB of RAM, and 12TFLOPS of performance. It'll go on sale this Fall.
• In the final quarter of 2016, AMD will start flogging Radeon Pro WX graphics cards for CAD and game-design workstations.
• AMD's R-Series system-on-chips, aimed at embedded computer hardware, have found their way into pachislot gambling machines built by Japanese biz Sammy Corporation, as El Reg mentioned back in February. ®