The big picture: Virtualization is a powerful tool for enterprises seeking to reduce hardware costs but maintaining the flexibility to reallocate resources at only a moment's notice. AMD's Radeon Pro V340 may be a high value product when considering the vast number of end users it may serve.
Dual GPU solutions live on as AMD shares details on their Radeon Pro V340 graphics card. The V340 contains two Vega chips on the same board intended to accelerate CAD software, rendering, and virtualization.
Touted as the first Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) hardware solution, the V340 has 32GB of HBM2 memory with ECC. AMD has made it possible for up to 32 virtual machines running to have 1GB of VRAM allocated to each. Each single Vega GPU can support up to 16 concurrent users.
Software vendors can use VDI with full support for OpenGL, OpenCL, DirectX, and other APIs. Dassault Systems Solidworks, PTC Creo, and Siemens NX are some of the first CAD tools that significantly benefit from true GPU virtualization.
AMD has enabled its own MxGPU Technology for GPU virtualization so that high performance cloud computing is possible without having to pay royalties or licensing fees incurred by other solutions.
For those that need improved video encoding performance, two video streams can be compressed to H.264 or H.265 simultaneously on the two virtualized encode engines.
The Radeon Pro V340 also emphasizes security. Secure boot and encrypted storage abilities ensure that organizations of all sizes keep their data in the right hands. Virtual machines are isolated from one another by hardware to prevent data leaks.
Industry leaders in virtualization technologies such as VMware and Citrix are already on board with AMD's new offering. "The AMD Radeon Pro V340 graphics card will enable our customers to securely leverage desktop and application virtualization for the most graphically demanding applications," said Sheldon D'Paiva, director of Product Marketing at VMware.
AMD's Radeon Pro V340 will be available beginning during Q4 2018.