AMD Announces Radeon Pro W6400 Workstation Graphics Card

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.

AMD promises up to 3.52 TFLOPs of FP32 single-precision compute performance and 7.07 TFLOPS of FP16 half-precision compute performance. Compared to its predecessors like the WX 3200 and older competitors like the Nvidia T600, the W6400 offers a substantial upgrade in performance over these older workstation GPUs. At least when it comes to synthetic FP16 and FP32 compute.

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).

Versions of this GPU will also come to the laptop market in the form of the W6300M and W6500M. Spec-wise, the W6300M will be slightly less powerful than the W6400 and pack just 2GB of RAM. But the W6500M will be significantly faster with an officially rated throughput of 10.61 TFLOPS of FP16 half-precision and 5.3 TFLOPS of FP32 single-precision performance. This is thanks to the much higher core count of 1024 steam processors packed into 16 CUs.

The Radeon Pro W6400 is available now, with a suggested price of $229.