AMD Introduces Sub-$1000 Radeon Pro WX 8200 Card Ahead of Siggraph
AMD today revealed a new tier of workstation graphics cards. The company announced the upcoming Radeon Pro WX 8200, which is expected to ship to graphics professionals next month. The new card, which is based on AMD’s existing Vega GPU architecture, is a slightly cut down version the flagship Radeon Pro WX 9100, which debuted last summer, for less than half the price of the top-tier card.
AMD’s Radeon Pro WX 9100 was a big jump in performance compared to the company's previous products, but it also carried a $2200 price tag, which of course limits potential customers. The company’s new Radeon Pro WX 8200 looks to offer most of the performance of the WX 9100 for under $1000.
AMD managed to trim the price by a huge margin by cutting the memory capacity and lowering the CU count of the GPU. The Radeon Pro WX 8200 features a Vega 10 GPU with a 1500MHz boost clock, like the WX 9100. However, the GPUs in the new cards have eight of their 64 compute units disabled. The WX 8200 also offers half the memory capacity, but with slightly higher memory bandwidth.
Despite the trimmed specifications, AMD said the new card should perform admirably in advanced workloads such as real-time visualization, virtual reality, and photorealistic rendering. The WX 82200 produces 10.8 TFLOPS of single precision and 21.5 TFLOPS of half precision floating point procedures, compared to the flagship WX 9100’s 12.3 TFLOPS and 24.6 TFLOPS, respectively.
The Radeon Pro WX 8200 also supports the same features and technologies as the higher-end Radeon Pro WX 9100, such as a High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), Enhanced Pixel Engine, Error Correcting Code (ECC) Memory, and AMD's Secure Processor. AMD said it also plans to have the WX 8200 certified for “many of today’s most popular applications – including Adobe CC, Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk 3ds Max, Revit, among others.”
AMD says the Radeon Pro WX 8200 will be available for pre-order for $999 at Newegg on August 13. The company expects to begin shipping cards in early September.
AMD Workstation Card Specification Comparison
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Radeon ProWX 9100 | Radeon ProWX 8200 | Radeon Pro WX 7100 | FirePro W8100 |
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 3584 | 2304 | 2560 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 32 | 64 |
| Boost Clock | 1500MHz | 1500MHz | 1243MHz | 824MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1.89Gbps HBM2 | 2.0Gbps HBM2 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 5Gbps GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 2048-bit | 2048-bit | 256-bit | 512-bit |
| Single Precision | 12.3 TFLOPS | 10.8 TFLOPS | 5.7 TFLOPS | 4.2 TFLOPS |
| Half Precision | 24.6 TFLOPS | 21.5 TFLOPS | 5.7 TFLOPS | 8.4 TFLOPS |
| VRAM | 16GB | 8GB | 8GB | 8GB |
| ECC | Yes (DRAM) | Yes (DRAM) | No | Yes (DRAM) |
| TDP | <250W | ? | <150W | 220W |
| GPU | Vega 10 | Vega 10 | Polaris 10 | Hawaii |
| Architecture | Vega(GCN 5) | Vega(GCN 5) | Polaris(GCN 4) | GCN 2 |
| Manufacturing Process | GloFo 14nm | GloFo 14nm | GloFo 14nm | TSMC 28nm |
| Launch Date | 10/2017 | 09/2018 | 11/2016 | 06/2014 |
| Launch Price (MSRP) | $2199 | $999 | $799 | $2499 |
Table credit: Anandtech
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Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
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Martell1977 Interesting that this isn't on the 12nm process. Odd they don't move it over to it.Reply -
PellehDin Not odd; they didn't want to upstage their flagship WX9100 until they moved to the next generation GPU. Marketing reigns supreme.Reply -
eamon.nerbonne It's almost certainly simply a lot cheaper to stick with binned 9100 versions (not to mention switching to a new process isn't free).Reply
If it were merely an issue of product positioning, they would instead of likely gimped the product some other way; some way that actually saves them money by allowing for smaller chips, higher yields, or some such thing. They did that *too* by halving the memory, right? -
bit_user This is literally just a Vega 56 with ECC memory and a $1k price tag.Reply
No, not odd. Vega 20 isn't so far along. They said it would sample to partners by the end of this year, which probably means cloud providers not requiring full driver support or certification with all the various workstation apps. That stuff takes time, you know?21225942 said:Interesting that this isn't on the 12nm process. Odd they don't move it over to it.
IMO, this just means that AMD wants to address more of the workstation market, but while avoiding price erosion on their top-end SKU (which already sells for a significantly less than comparable Nvidia Quadro cards).
The funny thing is that, unless you really needed ECC memory, you'd have been better off buying a Vega Frontier Edition. Or, maybe they're no longer made? Anyway, those also supported workstation apps, had 16 GB of memory, and (I think) shipped with all CUs enabled. Best of all, I think they were priced only a little higher than this one. -
rix340 The WX9100 model costs around $1499 and features 6 mini display ports. The WX8200 has only 4 mini display ports.Reply -
Giroro "The new card, which is based on AMD’s existing Vega GPU architecture, is a slightly cut down version the flagship Radeon Pro WX 9100, which debuted last summer, for less than half the price of the top-tier card. "Reply
That sentence makes it sound like the WX 9100 cost half as much as some unmentioned card. Maybe try again with 2 sentences and no commas. -
Giroro Reply21227717 said:For half the price... I wonder what they did to cut the cost that much.
Workstation GPUs have very high margins, so the most likely thing is they "ran out of customers willing to pay twice as much".
Well, that and these are flawed chips with slightly lower performance. It's pretty standard practice to sell those at a significantly reduced price.