AMD has announced its latest workstation graphics cards, the Radeon Pro W5500 for desktop workstations and the Radeon Pro W5500M for mobile ones. The new graphics solutions target professionals, such as designers and engineers, that require both performance and efficiency.
AMD Radeon Pro W5500
The Radeon Pro W5500 will be available in mid-February 2020 with a suggested e-tail price of $399. It comes in the form of a single-slot, PCIe add-in-card that's only 241mm long. The Radeon Pro W5500 carries the latest PCIe 4.0 x16 interface; however, the graphics card is only wired x8 electrically.
Specification-wise, the Radeon Pro W5500 is based on AMD's Navi die built with TSMC's 7nm FinFET process node. The chipmaker hasn't specified which die, but we suspect it's Navi 14. The graphics card has 22 Compute Units (CUs) for a total of 1,408 Stream Processors (SPs). A single fan provides active cooling
AMD didn't disclose the Radeon Pro W5500's clock speeds either, but its announcement reassured consumers that the graphics card delivers up to 5.35 TFLOPS and 330 GFLOPS of peak single-precision (FP32) and double-precision (FP64) performance, respectively.
There's also 8GB of onboard GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps across a 128-bit memory interface. This configuration allows the Radeon Pro W5500 to pump out a memory bandwidth of 224 GBps.
AMD Radeon Pro W5500 vs. Nvidia Quadro P2200
| Header Cell - Column 0 | AMD Radeon Pro W5500 | Nvidia Quadro P2200 |
|---|---|---|
| GPU Architecture | RDNA (Navi 14) | Pascal (GP106) |
| Shading Units | 1,408 | 1,280 |
| Double-Precision Performance | 330 GFLOPS | 119 GFLOPS |
| Single-Precision Performance | 5.35 TFLOPS | 3.8 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 88 | 80 |
| ROPs | 32 | 40 |
| Base Clock Rate | ? | 1,000 MHz |
| Boost Clock Rate | ? | 1,493 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 14 Gbps | 10 Gbps |
| Memory Capacity | 8GB GDDR6 | 5GB GDDR5X |
| Memory Bus | 128-bit | 160-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 224 GBps | 200 GBps |
| L2 Cache | 2MB | 1MB |
| TDP | 125W | 75W |
| Transistor Count | 6.4 billion | 4.4 billion |
| Die Size | 158 mm² | 200 mm² |
Nvidia's Pascal-powered Quadro P2200 is the Radeon Pro W5500's natural foe. According to AMD's provided numbers, the Radeon Pro W5500 deliver up to 50%, 19% and 4% higher performance in Enscape, Unity and Twinmotion, respectively. The Radeon Pro W5500 reportedly consumes one-third less power than the Quadro P2200 under load.
The Radeon Pro W5500 is rated with a 125W TDP and only requires a single six-pin PCIe power connector for external power. AMD equipped the graphics card with four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, so you have the option of connecting up to four 4K displays or a single 8K display at a 60 Hz refresh rate.
AMD Radeon Pro W5500M
Identical to the desktop variant, the Radeon Pro W5500M also features 1,408 SPs, but since this is geared toward laptops, it's clocked slightly lower. Based on AMD's numbers, the Radeon Pro W5500M offers up to 4.79 TFLOPS of single-precision (FP32) performance. The chipmaker rates the mobile graphics card with a 85W TDP, only 40W lower than the desktop model.
The Radeon Pro W5500M has half the memory of the Radeon Pro W5500. Fortunately, the memory speed and interface remain the same, so the graphics card is still good for a maximum memory bandwidth up to 224 GBps.
The Radeon Pro W5500M will be available in spring 2020, but we don't know which devices will carry it yet.
