The professional card market is a lucrative one. AMD has a history of professional cards that have also included features and support not seen in the standard desktop arena. AMD has slowly been chipping away at Nvidia’s Quadro marketshare and they hope that today’s announcement will help make further gains.
It has now been around five months since the initial release of the Polaris based graphics cards from AMD. Featuring the 4th generation GCN architecture and fabricated on Samsung’s latest 14nm process, the RX 4×0 series of chips have proven to be a popular option in the sub-$250 range of cards. These products may not have been the slam-dunk that many were hoping from AMD, they have kept the company competitive in terms of power and performance. AMD has also seen a positive impact from the sales of these products on the overall bottom line.
Today AMD is announcing three new professional cards based on the latest Polaris based GPUs. These range in power and performance from a sub 50 watt part up to a very reasonable 130 watts. These currently do not feature the SSD that was shown off earlier this year.
The lowest end offering is the Radeon Pro WX 4100. This is a low profile, single slot card that consumes less than 50 watts. It features 1024 stream units, which is greater than that of the desktop RX 460’s 896. The WX 4100 features 2.4 TFLOPS of performance while the RX 460 is at 2.2 TFLOPS. AMD did not specify exactly what chips were used in the professional cards, but the assumption here is that this one is a fully enabled Polaris 11.
The power consumption of this card is probably the most impressive part. Also of great interest is the DP 1.4 support and the four outputs. Finally the card supports 5K monitors at 60 Hz. This is a small, quiet, and cool running part that features the entire AMD Radeon Enterprise software support of the professional market.
The next card up is the Pro WX 5100. This features a sub 75 watt GPU that runs 1792 stream units. We guess that this chip is a cut down Polaris 10. On the desktop side it is similar to the RX 470, but that particular card features more stream units and a faster clockspeed. The RX 470 is rated at 4.9 TFLOPS while the WX 5100 is at 3.9 TFLOPS. Fewer stream units and a lower clockspeed allow it to hit that sub-75 watt figure.
It supports the same number of outputs as the 4100, but they are full sized DP. The card is full sized but still only single slot due to the very conservative TDP.
The final card is the WX 7100. This is based on the fully enabled Polaris 10 GPU and is physically similar to the RX 480. They both feature 2304 stream units, but the WX 7100 is slightly clocked down from the RX 480 as it features 5.7 TFLOPS of performance vs. 5.8 TFLOPS. The card is rated below 130 watts TDP which is about 20 watts lower than a standard RX 480. AMD has not explaing how they got such a low TDP on this card.
This card is again full sized but single slot. It features the same 4 DP connectors as the WX 5100 and the full monitor support that the 1.4 standard entails.
These products should see initial availability for this month. Currently the 7100 and 4100 are expected after the 10th while the 5100 should show up on the 18th.
AMD is also releasing the Radeon Pro Software. This is essentially their professional driver development that improves upon features, stability, and performance over time. AMD aims to release new drivers for this market every 4th Thursday each quarter.
This is certainly an important area for AMD to address with their new cards and this updated software scheme. NVIDIA has made a pretty penny over the years from their Quadro stack due to the extremely robust margins for these cards. The latest generation of AMD Radeon Pro WX cards look to stack up favorably against the latest products from NVIDIA.
The WX 7100 will come in at a $799 price point, while the WX 5100 and WX 4100 will hit $499 and $399 respectively.
