AMD's new Radeon Pro W6400 GPU is aimed at the entry-level workstation market, effectively completing AMD's RDNA2 product stack of professional video cards that range from the W6800 and W6600 down to the new W6400. The new card uses the Navi 24 GPU that also powers the Radeon RX 6500 XT that launched today, but with lower specs.
The Radeon Pro W6400 packs 12 CUs for a total of 768 stream processors paired with 4GB of GDDR6 memory on a 64-bit interface, giving it 128GBps of bandwidth. To help boost performance, the GPU also comes with a small 16MB L3 Infinity Cache, which is one of the lowest capacities we've seen on any RDNA2 GPU. Despite the small size, AMD says the cache provides an effective bandwidth increase of 161GBps.
Like its RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 brethren, the W6400 features the same unique PCIe 4.0 x4 configuration, rather than a more traditional x8 or x16 layout. This shouldn't be a problem for PCIe 4.0-capable motherboards, as four PCIe lanes at these speeds should be perfectly adequate. However, if you plan to use this GPU in a PCIe Gen 3.0 supported motherboard -- or worse, a Gen 2.0 slot, you might suffer performance penalties from the reduced bandwidth.
One of the W6400's biggest strengths comes from its power consumption of just 50 watts, which will allow AMD and its partners to create both full height and half height configurations of the GPU as well as single-slot versions. That will allow the card to fit into some truly compact chassis.
However, due to the nature of half-height models, the W6400 only supports a maximum of two DisplayPort 1.4 connections instead of the traditional four outputs we're used to seeing (which is the only major drawback of such a design).
