The problem was that the card in Papermaster’s hands was not the W9000. This was caught by a few sites that were not too busy drooling over the specs of the W9000. We picked up on this through The TechReport as they were covering the information on the event. According to AMD’s Dave Erskine the card that Papermaster was holding was, in fact a dual GPU product. For whatever reason Papermaster apparently needed something to show off so he brought this out instead of the actual W9000.

This brings up the question of where was the W9000? You would think that AMD would want to have shown off the real card and not get caught up in the same mess that nVidia did when they showed off a mockup for Fermi a few years ago. I mean the W9000 sounds very impressive, but it does not look all that impressive. Is it possible that someone thought the three-fanned monster would look better one stage? We have no doubt that the W9000 is real and there was a sample of it there for AMD to show off. However we think that someone made the decision to show off what they thought would be a much more impressive product.

The next question everyone will want answered is; is the dual-GPU card going to be a professional card only? It would stand to reason that the card shown will be equipped with dual Tahiti based GPUs so why not release one for the enthusiast crowd? It would certainly be something to compete with nVidia’s GTX 690 Dual-GPU card.

AMD is certainly paving the way to be the talk of SIGGRAPH in August we wonder what interesting things nVidia and Intel will have to say about this new “launch” we also wonder if the raw numbers will match up to real world performance. We have seen far too many companies spout off high performance numbers only to have them fall seriously short when the products were put into real systems. We will be looking out for some real-world performance on the W9000 when it is actually on the market to see if the claims meet the reality. We know that talking with AMD at CES we expressed our concern about their GPUs not doing better with professional applications, perhaps this will change some of that and we will see AMD re-enter the professional world on or near the top again.

Photo from The TechReport

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