Other than no fan, what do you get for that money? Virtualization support mainly. For the VDI set, that is worth the extra cash, it can pay for itself quickly when you look at ROI and TCO. The S cards support VMWare, Citrix, and even MS RemoteFX should you be evil enough to inflict that on your user base. For VMWare and Citrix the mapping is 1:1 for VMs to cards even though we hear the hardware supports more. In short, these cards allow VDI to become more or less a reality without hamstringing GUI performance, GPU compute functions, or simply adding more VMs per box in a traditional setup.
It will be interesting to see third party TCO numbers when all is said and done, if a FirePro S7000 or S9000 can add a dozen or two users per VDI box, it could well be worth the price of adding a few to every server. Then again, TCO calculations are usually finicky, situation specific, and less honest than a presidential candidates vague budget plan. We shall see how this market turns out, but there is definitely merit to the VDI concept, and now, two cards to back it up with hardware.
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
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