AMD Takes on Nvidia Quadro With Radeon Pro W5500 Workstation Graphics Card

AMD Radeon Pro W5500

AMD Radeon Pro W5500 (Image credit: AMD)

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

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0 AMD Radeon Pro W5500Nvidia Quadro P2200
GPU ArchitectureRDNA (Navi 14)Pascal (GP106)
Shading Units1,4081,280
Double-Precision Performance330 GFLOPS119 GFLOPS
Single-Precision Performance5.35 TFLOPS3.8 TFLOPS
Texture Units8880
ROPs3240
Base Clock Rate?1,000 MHz
Boost Clock Rate?1,493 MHz
Memory Clock14 Gbps10 Gbps
Memory Capacity8GB GDDR65GB GDDR5X
Memory Bus128-bit160-bit
Memory Bandwidth224 GBps200 GBps
L2 Cache2MB1MB
TDP125W75W
Transistor Count6.4 billion4.4 billion
Die Size158 mm²200 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. 

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • bit_user
    It's kind of sad to compare their new card with a GPU from over 3 years ago. The Nvidia card is basically a down-clocked GTX 1060.
    Reply
  • Davidshouse
    bit_user said:
    It's kind of sad to compare their new card with a GPU from over 3 years ago. The Nvidia card is basically a down-clocked GTX 1060.
    So which card would you like more as a workstation powering multiple 4k monitors? The p2200 or the Radeon Pro XT 5100 ?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Davidshouse said:
    So which card would you like more as a workstation powering multiple 4k monitors? The p2200 or the Radeon Pro XT 5100 ?
    Well, it depends on what software you want to run on it.

    If you're just looking for 2D acceleration, then it probably doesn't much matter. Otherwise, try to find some benchmarks relevant to your needs.

    On paper, the Radeon Pro W5500 is definitely the better card, but that's not worth a lot if it's not well-supported by the software you need to run on it.

    And, to be honest, I have somewhat more confidence in Nvidia's video encoding & decoding support.
    Reply