AMD looks to empower content creators with two new Radeon Pro cards based on its Vega architecture
AMD today announced two new Radeon Pro cards, the Radeon Pro WX9100 and Radeon Pro SSG, based on its Vega architecture.
Image Source: AMD
AMD today announced two new Radeon Pro cards based on its Vega architecture. These cards are designed for demanding commercial applications, such as interactive visualizations with VR, photorealistic rendering tasks, and 8K content creation.
The Radeon Pro WX 9100 is a step up from the FirePro W9100 that was launched in 2014, and AMD says it offers up to 50 per cent more memory bandwidth, 2.3 times better peak compute performance, and 2.6 times greater performance per watt.
It is equipped with 16GB of HBM2, or High Bandwidth Cache with ECC, and puts out 12.3 TFLOPS of single-precision performance. It also supports up to six 4K displays via six mini DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.
Image Source: AMD
The Radeon Pro SSG is the more interesting of the two. It follows up on the first Fiji-based Radeon Pro SSG that AMD debuted at Siggraph 2016, which allowed users to add up to 1TB of M.2 SSD storage via two PCIe 3.0 M.2 sockets.
The new card features 2TB of onboard solid state graphics memory, and its real boast is its 8K real-time rendering capabilities. It’ll primarily see use in workloads like scientific visualizations, the rendering of large data sets, medical imaging, and various oil and gas applications. And because the 2TB of NVMe memory sits between the High Bandwidth Cache Controller and the CPU, the GPU has a direct link to that without needing to go through the PCIe lanes from the chipset to access the system's traditional memory and storage options.
In fact, AMD says HBC works with the SSG memory in a similar way to how cache is mapped to regular memory.
A schematic diagram of how the SSG memory works.
AMD is also claiming up to 8GB/s of read performance and 6GB/s of write performance, so things should proceed at a nice clip.
Both cards are set to be available come 13 September. The Radeon Pro WX 9100 will cost US$2,199, while the Radeon Pro SSG is asking for a hefty US$6,999.
In terms of OEM partners, Dell will be the first to bring the Radeon Pro SSG to market with its latest Precision workstation towers. Of course, Dell's also hoping that customers will pair the workstations with its cutting-edge 8K monitors, the better to take advantage of the card's real-time 8K rendering capabilities, which will allow you to do things like capture and edit movies in 8K.
Finally, AMD announced that it is making its Radeon ProRenderer rendering engine completely open-source. It is targeted at graphics researchers and educational institutions, and uses the cross-platform OpenCL 1.2 framework. But other than OpenCL 1.2 support, there are no other hardware requirements, and users will be able to take advantage of features like support for compound materials, light transport, and global illumination.
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