AMD is launching its new FirePro R5000 in a bid to gain some interest in the remote graphics market. The outfit has teamed up with the workstation graphics virtualisation company Teradici to create a GPU that can offload in hardware, as well as software by taking Teradici's hardware compression chip to a workstation graphics card meant for server deployment. 

The big idea is that Teradici's PCoIP technology can integrate all of a businesses' workstation hardware into a single datacentre and its PCoIP compression chip transmits pixel information rather than raw data streams, substantially saving on bandwidth. All of the transmissions are encrypted and the R5000 can drive up to four 1920x12090 monitors or two 2560x1600 displays.

In a statement AMD said that this lets companies save space in small environments where packing dozens of desktops or laptops is impractical, but thin clients fit. AMD noted that it's only selling the R5000 and not the thin-clients that go along with it. It has certified two older cards based on Radeon HD 4000 technology to work with Teradici.

Both AMD and Nvidia are having a crack at the virtualised workstation graphics in the past year. AMD has the S10000 and Nvidia has VDI and a specialized board capable of driving four separate workstations from a single PCB.