AMD Announces Dual-Vega Radeon Pro V340 Card With 32GB of ECC HBM Memory
While we all wait patiently (or not so patiently) to find out if Nvidia’s Turing cards like the GeForce RTX 2080 are worth the ray-tracing hype, AMD picked a lazy Sunday to officially launch its dual-Vega Radeon Pro V340 at VMworld in Las Vegas. Considering the venue, it shouldn’t be surprising that this card is aimed at high-density data center environments.
The V340 is based on AMD’s existing Vega architecture, and there’s no mention of a die shrink. So this card effectively takes two of the 14nm GPUs you’d typically find in a Vega 64 or Vega 56 and crams them into a single card with a dual-slot design, complete with an ample 32GB of second-generation Error Correcting Code (ECC) high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
If you’ve read reviews of the consumer Vega cards, or played around with a pair in Crossfire, you might balk at the potential heat issues and power requirements involved in putting a pair of these GPUs together on the same PCB. Keep in mind, though, that the Radeon Pro V340 is designed for very different workloads than consumer graphics, and AMD isn’t directly competing here with Nvidia’s more-efficient consumer 10-series parts. So clock speeds are likely tuned to balance power and performance in very different ways than consumer desktop Vega chips.
The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) world that AMD’s new card is designed to drop into is about parallel performance, not fast-as-you-can frame rates. It’s aimed at accelerating CAD, design, and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) workloads, as well as rendering. AMD's virtualized MxGPU solution competes with Nvidia's GRID.
AMD says one V340 can support up to 32 1GB virtual machines, or “up to 33 percent more than” Nvidia’s competing Tesla P40. The company also says its new card has an integrated encode engine capable of independently compressing video streams in H.264 and H.265, thus lightening the load on the CPU.
With the continued discovery of new vulnerabilities inherent in modern computing hardware, potential buyers of the V340 should also note that AMD says its card has a built-in security processor that can encrypt storage and secure the boot process.
According to AMD, the Radeon Pro V340 graphics card should be available in Q4 of 2018. No price has been announced. But that may still be up in the air while AMD waits to see if Nvidia is going to stick with its Volta-based Tesla cards for now, or release a new generation of Turing-based parts to one-up AMD in the data center space.
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After a rough start with the Mattel Aquarius as a child, Matt built his first PC in the late 1990s and ventured into mild PC modding in the early 2000s. He’s spent the last 15 years covering emerging technology for Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Consumer Reports, while testing components and PCs for Computer Shopper, PCMag and Digital Trends.
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TCA_ChinChin Cool professional and datacenter card. Cannot be more ready for Navi and the next GPU architecture from AMD though, seeing what NVIDIA does (and really what most companies would do) in the face of little competition.Reply -
Rexer Lol. Didn't we just see an Nvidia 2080 or (likewise gpu) come out of the secret closet? To me, this has yet to see if it'll have an effect on the GPU market. I'd love to see ah $350.00 Vega64 and a $350 1080ti on the market (probably never happen that way buy who can stop hoping)? With crypo currency in a shortfall, we could see a purchasing advantage for a short time.Reply -
Rexer Reply21267251 said:Cool professional and datacenter card. Cannot be more ready for Navi and the next GPU architecture from AMD though, seeing what NVIDIA does (and really what most companies would do) in the face of little competition.
Yeah. Competition. Can't be a bad thing. It's when they collaborate and monopolize the market that's really frightening. Hope AMD does well. Hope Nvidia and AMD get their trolls, flunkies and fanboys. Spec captains or not, when one company thrives the prices rise. -
Co BIY The old (Client-server computing) is new again (VDI, cloud-based).Reply
Interesting that video compression is touted. Is this targeted at something like a Youtube server farm ? -
bit_user Reply
Not professional in the sense of workstation cards, though. Note the lack of display connectors and cooling fans.21267251 said:Cool professional and datacenter card. -
jimmysmitty Reply21267251 said:Cool professional and datacenter card. Cannot be more ready for Navi and the next GPU architecture from AMD though, seeing what NVIDIA does (and really what most companies would do) in the face of little competition.
To be fair Turing is a pretty massive change to the GPU. It has dedicated hardware to finally utilize real time ray tracing. How effective that is will be seen but even without hard competition they pushed something quite innovative out.
What is being affected though are GPU prices. If it isn't the Crypto mining craze pushing some GPUs to new heights of cost (the Vega 64 was more than a GTX 1080ti) its not enough competition from one side to push MSRP higher.
Personally I think I will wait till Navi and whatever 7nm refresh nVidia plans to do. Might be cheaper cards that give better performance by then. I think my 1080 will hold out sell enough till then.
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indologie <Redacted quoted spam>Reply
Cool man, hope she buys you an RTX 2080 Ti, sure can afford it!