AMD Introduces Sub-$1000 Radeon Pro WX 8200 Card Ahead of Siggraph

By Kevin Carbotte
published

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

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Row 0 - Cell 0 Radeon ProWX 9100Radeon ProWX 8200Radeon Pro WX 7100FirePro W8100
Stream Processors4096358423042560
ROPs64643264
Boost Clock1500MHz1500MHz1243MHz824MHz
Memory Clock1.89Gbps HBM22.0Gbps HBM27Gbps GDDR55Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width2048-bit2048-bit256-bit512-bit
Single Precision12.3 TFLOPS10.8 TFLOPS5.7 TFLOPS4.2 TFLOPS
Half Precision24.6 TFLOPS21.5 TFLOPS5.7 TFLOPS8.4 TFLOPS
VRAM16GB8GB8GB8GB
ECCYes (DRAM)Yes (DRAM)NoYes (DRAM)
TDP<250W?<150W220W
GPUVega 10Vega 10Polaris 10Hawaii
ArchitectureVega(GCN 5)Vega(GCN 5)Polaris(GCN 4)GCN 2
Manufacturing ProcessGloFo 14nmGloFo 14nmGloFo 14nmTSMC 28nm
Launch Date10/201709/201811/201606/2014
Launch Price (MSRP)$2199$999$799$2499

Table credit: Anandtech

Kevin Carbotte

 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. 

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 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).

    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?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    This is literally just a Vega 56 with ECC memory and a $1k price tag.

    21225942 said:
    Interesting that this isn't on the 12nm process. Odd they don't move it over to it.
    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?

    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.
    Reply
  • rix340
    The WX9100 model costs around $1499 and features 6 mini display ports. The WX8200 has only 4 mini display ports.
    Reply
  • redgarl
    For half the price... I wonder what they did to cut the cost that much.
    Reply
  • bilazaurus
    The prices are getting obscenely ridiculous.
    Reply
  • bananaforscale
    Bilazaurus, did you miss that these are workstation cards, not gaming cards?
    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. "

    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.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    21227717 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.
    Reply