AMD Radeon Pro targets professionals and creators with extreme workloads

Advanced Micro Devices has launched its high-end professional AMD Radeon Pro graphics cards for creators and professionals.

The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker said the AMD Radeon PRO W7000 Series is targeted to handle extreme workloads with three times the data rate and 1.5 times more performance than the previous generation of graphics cards.

Much like AMD Radeon RX 7900 graphics cards launched in December, the new pro graphics cards come with RDNA 3 architecture and are the first professional graphics cards to use AMD’s chiplet design, which uses different manufacturing processes such as 5-nanometer or 6-nanometer production on the same chip. With this tech, modern processors contain multiple chips, called chiplets, rather than a single monolithic chip on a single substrate. 

“When this technology becomes a little bit more mainstream, we will have gone out and future-proofed our customers thinking that this is here today,” said Jimmy Holbert, director of Radeon creator and workstation strategy at Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, in a press briefing.

He said this is capable of handling “extreme workloads.”

The new cards also use DisplayPort 2.1, providing three times the maximum total data rate compared to DisplayPort 1.41. And the new cards deliver 1.5 times faster geomean performance and provide 1.5 times more memory than the previous generation.

AMD’s aim is to lead on “performance per dollar.” They let creators work with high-polygon count models seamlessly, deliver image fidelity and color accuracy, and run graphics and compute-based applications
concurrently without disruption to workflows, AMD said.

The new graphics cards are also the first professional workstation GPUs to offer the new AMD Radiance Display Engine featuring DisplayPort 2.1 that delivers a superior visual experience, higher resolutions and more available colors than ever before.

The AMD Radeon PRO W7900 graphics card, designed for extreme workloads, features 61 TFLOPS (FP32) peak single precision performance, offering 1.5 times higher geomean performance on the SPECviewperf 2020 benchmark. It also includes 48GB of GDDR6 memory, which is 1.5 times larger memory capacity than the 32GB available on the previous-generation graphics card.

Created for heavy workloads, the AMD Radeon PRO W7800 graphics card features 45 TFLOPS (FP32) peak single precision performance and 32GB of GDDR6 memory.

“The new AMD Radeon PRO W7000 Series are the most powerful graphics cards AMD has built to date, providing professionals, creators and artists with exceptional performance and value to drive the most demanding professional design and creative applications,” said Scott Herkelman, senior vice president and general manager of the graphics business unit at AMD, in a statement. “ The AMD Radeon PRO W7000 Series graphics cards give professionals the ability to tackle larger projects, render faster and create more complex models loaded with more pixels, more polygons, and more textures.”

AMD Radeon PRO W7000 Series workstation graphics cards are designed to help professionals
meet high-pressure deadlines under increasingly tight budgets while delivering world-class results.

The AMD RDNA 3 architecture enables new compute units to share resources between rendering, AI, and
raytracing to make the most effective use of each transistor, offering approximately 50% more
raytracing performance per compute unit than the previous generation.

Increasingly, as streaming becomes more popular and more people want to make careers as video bloggers, the line between high-end professional editors and other creators is blurring, said Gary Davis, senior GTM manager at Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, in a press briefing.

“We’re talking about massive datasets,” Davis said.

Davis said AMD could outdo rivals like Nvidia’s top chip with twice the performance per dollar.

In addition to chiplets, it has dedicated AI acceleration and second-generation raytracing with new AI instructions and increased AI throughput deliver over two times more performance than the previous AMD RDNA 2 architecture. The second-generation raytracing technology delivers significantly higher
performance than the previous generation.

Professional applications that can take advantage of the larger framebuffer include Adobe Premiere Pro & After Effects, Autodesk 3ds Max & Maya, Blender, Boris FX, Sapphire, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, Visualize, DaVinci Resolve, Lumion, Maxon Redshift and more.

It also has dual encode/decode media engines unlock new multi-media experiences with full AV1 encode/decode support designed for high resolutions, wide color gamut, and high-dynamic range enhancements.

The AMD Radeon PRO W7900 costs $4,000. The AMD Radeon PRO W7800 costs $2,500. The AMD Radeon PRO W7000 Series workstation graphics cards are expected to be available from leading etailers/retailers starting in Q2, 2023. Product availability in OEM and SI systems is expected in 2H 2023. AMD is showing them off at the NAB Show 2023 in Las Vegas.