New Radeon Pro VII Wows on Price and Double Precision
AMD provides a compelling alternative to Quadro
Earlier this morning, AMD revealed its new Radeon Pro VII graphics card, its latest workstation-class competitor to Nvidia’s Quadro line of GPUs. As its name suggests, this is a professional level update on last year’s Radeon VII GPU, incorporating the same Vega 20 GPU but almost doubling the base Radeon VII’s double precision performance.
Row 0 - Cell 0 | Radeon Pro VII | Radeon VII | Radeon Pro W5700 | Radeon Pro WX 9100 |
CUs | 60 | 60 | 36 | 64 |
ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 |
Boost Clock | ~1700MHz | ~1750MHz | ~1930MHz | 1500MHz |
Memory Clock | 2.0Gbps HBM2 | 2.0Gbps HBM2 | 14Gbps GDDR6 | 1.89Gbps HBM2 |
Memory Bus Width | 4096-bit | 4096-bit | 256-bit | 2048-bit |
Single Precision | 13.1 TFLOPs | 13.8 TFLOPs | 8.89 TFLOPs | 12.3 TFLOPs |
Double Precision | 6.5 TFLOPs | 3.5 TFLOPs | 556 GFLOPs | 769 GFLOPs |
VRAM | 16GB | 16GB | 8GB | 16GB |
ECC | Yes | Yes | No | Yes(DRAM) |
TDP | 250W | 300W | 205W | Less than 250W |
GPU | Vega 20 | Vega 20 | Navi 10 | Vega 10 |
Architecture | Vega (GCN 5) | Vega (GCN 5) | RDNA (1) | Vega (GCN5) |
Infinity Fabric Link | Yes(2x) | No | No | No |
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 7nm | TSMC 7nm | TSMC 7nm | GloFo 14nm |
Release Date | 06/2020 | 02/2019 | 11/2019 | 10/2017 |
Price | $1,899 | $699 | $799 | $2,199 |
When AMD announced the Radeon VII at its keynote last year, it was the world’s first 7nm gaming graphics card, using Vega 20 to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 2080. Now, AMD is applying Vega 20 to its workstation cards, producing a pro-level successor to the Radeon VII that takes almost the same specs and ups the double precision performance to 6.5 TFLOPs, offering support for mixed graphics/compute tasks that almost matches Nvidia’s much more expensive Quadro GV100.
While this comes at the cost of a slightly lower boost clock and slightly lessened single precision performance, making it not quite as powerful of a gaming machine as its non pro predecessor, this will make it a boon to 3D modelers and financial analysts, who frequently run mixed graphics/compute software.
The AMD Infinity Fabric external link is also a new addition to the Radeon Pro VII, migrating over from the Radeon Instinct MI50/MI60. The purpose here is to make multi-GPU performance more efficient, enabling a total of 168GB/sex bandwidth between two connected GPUs.
All these features also make it Vega 10 Radeon Pro WX 9100, which runs on Vega 10, as well as the Radeon Pro W5700, assuming memory clock speed isn’t a priority.
Of course, the key feature for the Radeon Pro VII compared to its Nvidia Quadro counterparts is price. Launching for $1,800, it’s primed to severely undercut Nvidia’s double precision king, the Quadro GV100, while also remaining competitive with the Quadro RTX 5000 and 6000. While its feature set is unique- the GV100 is only really a fair comparison when it comes to FP64 support- this makes it a strong buy for value, assuming it fits your needs.
The Radeon VII is set to launch later this June.
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Michelle Ehrhardt is an editor at Tom's Hardware. She's been following tech since her family got a Gateway running Windows 95, and is now on her third custom-built system. Her work has been published in publications like Paste, The Atlantic, and Kill Screen, just to name a few. She also holds a master's degree in game design from NYU.
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spongiemaster offering support for mixed graphics/compute tasks that almost matches Nvidia’s much more expensive Quadro GV100.
Yea, nice timing on this announcement. The day before NVidia is going to announce the successor to the 2 year old GV100, which is rumored to be an absolute monster. It will be nice when AMD gets off the 2 years behind Nvidia cadence they're currently on. Still waiting on that 1080Ti killer. -
MasterMadBones
I don't think this launch is as big as you're trying to make it out to be. This card launches over a year after the original Radeon VII came out, and the configuration is extremely similar to the MI50, which has been out for even longer, but with video output. It's more like a product for which there was unexpected demand or a stop-gap card, much like Radeon VII itself. Arcturus is around the corner and should match GA100's core count, so that could be fairly close, although I don't expect it to be hugely impressive.spongiemaster said:Yea, nice timing on this announcement. The day before NVidia is going to announce the successor to the 2 year old GV100, which is rumored to be an absolute monster. It will be nice when AMD gets off the 2 years behind Nvidia cadence they're currently on. Still waiting on that 1080Ti killer. -
dlee67 "performance more efficient, enabling a total of 168GB/s-x bandwidth between two connected GPUs"Reply
typo, per second, right?
maybe not rock and roll bandwidth -
alextheblue enabling a total of 168GB/sex bandwidth between two connected GPUs.
Powering "next-gen" VR experiences! -
Rdslw
well they are not even trying to get the performance crown. Nvidia is currently unbeatable there. But they have some stuff in mid range that makes sense, if you want power/performance and $/performance, and can compromise on pure horsepower....spongiemaster said:Yea, nice timing on this announcement. The day before NVidia is going to announce the successor to the 2 year old GV100, which is rumored to be an absolute monster. It will be nice when AMD gets off the 2 years behind Nvidia cadence they're currently on. Still waiting on that 1080Ti killer.
Price at the crown is skyrocketing so it makes sense to be in that price range for most of us.
but yeah overall if you only look at full speed, they are not even trying ATM. -
vinay2070
Thats how 2 'connected' GPUs have fun ;)dlee67 said:"performance more efficient, enabling a total of 168GB/s-x bandwidth between two connected GPUs"
typo, per second, right?
maybe not rock and roll bandwidth -
Broly MAXIMUMER
Arguably, anyone with such mentality is in the wrong place to begin with. This is a compute card that has it's perks in certain production environments even over Nvidia's top of the line. Honestly it'll be Navi 2 where the fight comes back all around.Rdslw said:well they are not even trying to get the performance crown. Nvidia is currently unbeatable there. But they have some stuff in mid range that makes sense, if you want power/performance and $/performance, and can compromise on pure horsepower....
Price at the crown is skyrocketing so it makes sense to be in that price range for most of us.
but yeah overall if you only look at full speed, they are not even trying ATM.
Wont lie. Personally, being in the middle, vega was my dream card. Looking at the whitepaper, and considering Navi pro launched a while back, it seems anyone boing more than pushing pixels will have a few new cards to consider from Radeon soon! -
badbeatborat Given the price for Radeon Pro VII, I'd rather snap up a couple of Radeon VII at $500 each. For my purposes, I'd prefer to not lose what gaming performance the VII has over the Pro VII, and it's one of the top cards for video editing on Davinci Resolve. It may get harder to find Radeon VII brand new for that price though. I wish AMD would fix their reset bug though.Reply