Is FirePro S7150x2 worth ¥380? | Generated by AI
Question: What is AMD FirePro S7150x2 16GB dual GPU professional card? Is it worth ¥380?
Answer:
The AMD FirePro S7150x2 is a server/workstation professional GPU, not a normal gaming card. It is basically two FirePro S7150 GPUs on one PCB, designed for GPU virtualization (MXGPU), VDI, CAD, rendering farms, and professional workloads.
Key specs:
| FirePro S7150x2 | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | AMD GCN (Fiji era) |
| Release | ~2016 |
| GPU cores | 2 × 2048 stream processors |
| VRAM | 16GB total (2 × 8GB GDDR5 ECC) |
| Memory bus | 2 × 256-bit |
| Compute | ~5.8 TFLOPS FP32 |
| Power | ~265W |
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x16 |
| Cooling | Passive server heatsink (usually needs strong airflow) |
The important detail:
“16GB” does NOT mean one 16GB GPU.
Internally:
PCIe x16
|
+---- GPU A
| 8GB VRAM
|
+---- GPU B
8GB VRAM
Software sees two GPUs.
Compared with GPUs you have been looking at
FirePro S7150x2 vs Tesla M60
Very similar concept:
| S7150x2 | Tesla M60 | |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 2016 | 2015 |
| GPUs | 2 | 2 |
| VRAM | 16GB | 16GB |
| Memory | GDDR5 ECC | GDDR5 ECC |
| FP32 | ~5.8 TF | ~8.1 TF |
| CUDA | ❌ | ✅ |
| ROCm | ❌ basically | ❌ |
| Virtualization | Excellent | Excellent |
Tesla M60 has CUDA ecosystem advantage, but both are old.
For AI / LLM usage
Not recommended.
Reasons:
1. No CUDA
Most AI stack:
PyTorch
|
CUDA
|
NVIDIA GPU
FirePro:
PyTorch
|
ROCm? (very limited)
|
GCN Fiji
Modern ROCm does not support Fiji well.
2. VRAM is fragmented
You cannot run:
16GB model
like RTX 3090.
Because:
GPU0: 8GB
GPU1: 8GB
You need model parallelism.
Example:
Layer 0-20 -> GPU0
Layer 21-40 -> GPU1
but consumer frameworks are not optimized for this.
3. Very low performance today
Compare:
| GPU | FP32 |
|---|---|
| FirePro S7150x2 | ~5.8 TF |
| RTX 3060 | ~12.7 TF |
| RTX 4070 | ~29 TF |
| RTX 3090 | ~36 TF |
Your RTX 4070 is roughly 5x faster.
Where it is actually interesting
For ¥380, it is a fun card for:
✅ GPU virtualization lab
This is where it shines.
Example:
One physical card
GPU partition:
VM1 -> 4GB
VM2 -> 4GB
VM3 -> 4GB
VM4 -> 4GB
AMD calls this:
MxGPU
Similar idea to NVIDIA vGPU.
✅ OpenCL experiments
Can run:
- Blender OpenCL (old)
- scientific workloads
- compute experiments
✅ Homelab / collection
For a GPU researcher:
RTX 4070
RTX 3090
Tesla M60
FirePro S7150x2
MI50
It is interesting historically.
The ¥380 question
My rating:
| Usage | Value |
|---|---|
| AI training | ❌ 2/10 |
| LLM inference | ❌ 2/10 |
| Gaming | ❌ 1/10 |
| CAD workstation | ⚠️ 5/10 |
| Virtualization lab | ✅ 8/10 |
| GPU collection | ✅ 8/10 |
At ¥380 (~$50):
- As an AI GPU: skip.
- As a virtualization toy: quite interesting.
- As a collector card: good price.
For your AI experiments (nanoGPT, LLM fine-tuning, agents), a used RTX 3090 24GB is still in another universe:
FirePro S7150x2:
2 × 8GB old GCN
RTX 3090:
24GB unified VRAM
CUDA
Tensor cores
FlashAttention support
modern PyTorch
The S7150x2 is a “server history artifact”; the RTX 3090 is still a practical AI accelerator.
