AMD FirePro W9100 - "half-rate" double precision?

As the cryptocurency (Bitecoin, Litecoin…) miners quickly realize, the AMD graphic cards FP64 double precison give them very powerfull edge on mining. And that was when officialy the double precison is 1/8 speed of the single precision calculations for R9 GPUs. In reality, most of the GCN architecture can get in real life to 1/16, 1/4 and even 1/2 of the single precision speeds.

However people argued, that Hawaii chips (R9) should not support 1/2 rate od double precision over single precision, because Hawaii chips are 438mm2 in size, while Tahiti is 365mm2, witch is then only 20% larger AND it come with 38% more of stream processors, 50% more ROP units and 33% wider memory bus.
It does not make sense (even that the memory interface get surprisingly smaller when getting wider in Hawaii), but ... AMD now claiming it:

(looking at the stacked cards I find hard to believe that this system could actually work - that is, because there is almost no place for air intake in the top 3 cards that could the blower use… not to mention that AMD cards from the R7/R9 GPU family produce too much heat and the professional versions of AMD cards did not use any different GPUs, so the problems with cooling will remain and in fact, by stacking the cards like this will probably result in catastrophic thermal failure... but hey, at least John could hook up now SIX 4k monitors there  😄 )

Official, todays released parametrs are even better that promised:
Double Precision - 2.62 TFlops!
Single Precision - 5.24 TFlops
930MHz core, 5.0GHz rams and 16G onboard ram.
TDP shall be limited to 275W.

That is probably fastest mining card ever - however the price is a bit step - 3995 dollars. Cards will be used in, for example, HP lines Z820 / Z620 and Dell Precision ones.

I'm still quite puzzled, how they can achieve so much more DP computing speed, that R 290X cards reached. Since the chips are the same, then the only one difference is the bios. So there could be a way, how to using modified bios unlock such DP speed on classic R9 290X cards, I think.
Sure that won't help games, but cryptocoin miners will be probably quite much interesed about it. I bet 🙂

Meh.  Anyone still running GPUs is in for a world of hurt in the near future.  They simply will not be able to break even (let alone be profitable) for much longer.

Personally Id rather pick up a couple Hex Fury's, a USB powereed port (up volt mod it) and blow these out of the water for less cost (AMDs MSRP are a bad joke right now) AND only use a couple dozen watts per hour:•fury/

YMMV…but DP should go back to being for professionals only not 'me too' peeps wanting to get in on the bottom rung of the pyramid scheme that is BTC.

You are right that ASIC mining is the way to go in the cryptocurency world. I was just interesed on finding a ways, how to bring such duble precision speeds into "causual bottom-of-the-foodchain miners" with R9 cards. Because doubling the performance is something that they sure wanted a lot.

I think that GPU mining is as hobby for people with powerfull computers, who when not gaming let use their resources this way. ASIC miners is about to blow them "out of the water" easily - "64 ASICs on-board that offers 24GH/s performance which is equivalent to more than 30 ATI 7970 graphic cards."

And IIRC, Soul is selling a 180GH/s ASIC miner there:
"Ultimate S1 Antminer $750 Shipped 180 GH/s Power consumption is 160-380W"

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