AMD Announces Radeon Pro W7900 & W7800...
AMD has announced the launch of their next generation high-end workstation cards, the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800. These are the first workstation-class cards based on AMD’s new RDNA 3 GPU architecture and associated Navi 31 GPU. They are aimed at the professional visualization (proviz) market, which is a small but important segment of the video card market, serving users who require more RAM, more I/O, and more support than a consumer graphics card can provide. The cards are designed for CAD, CAM, 3D animation/rendering, video editing, visual effects, and AI acceleration, and offer identical feature sets including ECC memory support and full DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR20 support.
Despite the launch of the new Radeon Pro cards, AMD's workstation graphics division remains on the outside looking in, with NVIDIA holding the lion's share of the proviz market for several years. AMD is trying to compete by emphasizing its performance-per-dollar advantage over NVIDIA and trying to capitalize on any feature blind spots in NVIDIA's product lineup. However, this generation of Radeon Pro cards brings some significant changes, including more than one high-end workstation card, a significant increase in size and price of the flagship W7900, and a reduction in DisplayPort outputs from 6 to 4. The new cards are built on AMD's RDNA 3 GPU architecture, and AMD aims to improve its product stack and gain more market share in the proviz market.
RADEON PRO W7900
The Radeon Pro W7900 is the flagship of AMD's new generation of workstation cards, featuring a fully-enabled Navi 31-based GPU with the same configuration and clockspeeds as the consumer Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but paired with an even larger 48GB of GDDR6 memory. This card is rated for a peak single precision throughput of 61 TFLOPS, with twice as much memory at its disposal. However, AMD has backed off on memory clockspeeds a bit compared to their consumer graphics card, running at 18Gbps for a total of 864 GB/second of memory bandwidth. The W7900 has a TDP of 295 watts and is a triple slot card, a notable departure from AMD's previous workstation cards. AMD is targeting a 1.5x performance gain for the W7900 versus its closest predecessor, the W6800.
RADEON PRO W7800
AMD is also offering the Radeon Pro W7800, a second-tier high-end workstation card that offers lower performance at a lower price, and in a dual slot card design. The W7800 features a cut-down Navi 31 with 70 CUs enabled, 256-bit memory bus, 32GB of VRAM with soft ECC support, and a total of 64MB of infinity cache. The card is rated for peak throughput of 45 TFLOPS, offering around 74% of the performance of AMD’s flagship video card. The W7800 has a TBP of 260 Watts, making it a drop-in replacement for AMD’s previous Pro card.
RDNA 3 For Workstations: Chiplets, AV1, & True DisplayPort 2.1
AMD has introduced its new RDNA 3 GPU architecture into the workstation ecosystem with the announcement of the Radeon Pro W7000. The chiplet-based Navi 31 GPU is being used in both of the new cards, which offers design efficiencies and a cost optimization technique for AMD to deliver better performance per dollar than NVIDIA. AMD has added AI accelerator blocks to boost dense matrix math throughput and dual issue stream processors for traditional rendering workloads. The W7000 series cards will also have AV1 video encoding for the first time and support for DisplayPort 2.1 compatibility. However, the Eyefinity 6-style layout of 6 mini-DisplayPorts has been given up for a more traditional 4 port configuration, meaning the cards can only directly drive 4 displays.
Retail Cards Shipping in Q2’2023, OEM Systems in H2’2023
According to the company, the Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800 will be available at retailers starting at some point this quarter (Q2). The W7900 will carry an MSRP of $3999, while the W7800 will sell for $2499. Meanwhile the cards will start shipping in prebuilt OEM systems a bit later, with the first W7000-equipped systems expected in the second half of the year.