AMD Reveals Radeon Pro VII: A Workstation Card For When You Need It All

[harlan4096]

This morning AMD is taking the wraps off of a new high-end video card aimed at the workstation market, the Radeon Pro VII. True to its namesake, this is a professional version of the Radeon VII, which was first launched last year, incorporating AMD’s Vega 20 GPU and its full suite of pro-grade features. Taking the place at the top of AMD’s Radeon Pro stack of video cards, the Radeon Pro VII is aimed at AMD’s biggest workload customers in the CAD/CAM, media, and HPC workstation industries, who are willing to pay a premium for AMD’s fastest workstation card yet.

Like its namesake, the Radeon Pro VII is based on the company’s Vega 20 GPU, which when it launched in late 2018 was AMD’s first 7nm GPU. And though AMD is now on to their newer Navi architecture for graphics workloads, Vega 20 remains AMD’s single most powerful GPU to date. This is particularly evident in mixed graphics/compute or pure-compute workloads, where Vega 20’s unique features like fast double precision support, extreme memory bandwidth, and external

Infinity Fabric links are not matched by any other card, and have become the backbone of AMD’s compute-focused Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 cards.

All told, AMD hasn’t produced a card like the Radeon Pro VII in quite some time. There have been numerous Radeon Pro cards over the last few years, but all of these were based on AMD’s more broad-market consumer and workstation GPUs. The Radeon Pro VII, by contrast, is AMD’s first professional card since 2014 that ticks all the boxes for both graphics and compute, offering significant rendering capabilities paired with the widest array of GPU compute features that AMD offers.

In short, this is the card for workstation users who need it all, and they need it all in a single product.

By the numbers, the Radeon Pro VII is a capable replacement for the Radeon Pro WX 9100 in AMD’s product stack. Similar to what we’ve seen there, AMD is swapping out older Vega 10 cards for newer and more powerful Vega 20 cards. The results from a performance perspective make the Radeon Pro VII the most powerful pro card in AMD’s arsenal, though the gains over the WX 9100 are a mixed bag.

With 60 active CUs and a boost clockspeed of roughly 1700MHz, on paper the Radeon Pro VII is not terribly faster in FP32 compute/graphics workloads than the WX 9100 it replaces; the clockspeed boost afforded by 7nm has been tempered somewhat by the lower CU count. Instead, what makes the Radeon Pro VII stand out is everything it can do that the WX 9100 could not, starting with double precision performance. Thanks to Vega 20, the card offers half-rate FP64 performance, giving it a peak throughput of 6.5 TFLOPs, over 8x that of the WX 9100, and almost 2x that of the consumer Radeon VII.

Backing the new pro card and its capabilities is a greatly enhanced memory controller backend. AMD has gone for a 4 stack HBM2 configuration, which with a memory clockspeed of 2Gbps/pin gives the card a total memory bandwidth of 1TB/second. This is more than double the bandwidth available on any other Radeon Pro card, and its why paper specifications only go so far. For extremely heavy workloads that will end up chewing up memory bandwidth – particularly anything pushing a lot of pixels – the Radeon Pro VII is much better equipped. And, of course, as a native feature of HBM2, it offers ECC memory protection.

The new card also comes with a couple of different and notable boosts to input/output options. First and foremost, the Radeon Pro VII comes with support for AMD’s external Infinity Fabric Link, which was first deployed in the Radeon Instinct MI50/MI60. The single connector along the top of the card provides for two IF links, offering a total of 168GB/sec of bandwidth (84GB/sec in each direction) between a pair of video cards. As with its Radeon Instinct implementation (and NVIDIA’s rival NVLink), the idea here is to allow both cards to more closely and efficiently work together for better multi-GPU performance, as well as for pooling the cards’ respective memory pools. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the better bandwidth and lower latency offered by IFLink, which is several times better than what PCI Express can provide. That said, because the technology is still relatively new for AMD’s GPUs, for graphics/rendering workloads it’s currently only supported with AMD’s ProRender 2.0 software.
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[harlan4096]

Additional Info: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-an...-Radeon-Pr