Published in Graphics

AMD announces Radeon Pro WX pricing and availability

by on08 November 2016


Workstation ready

AMD has announced pricing and availability for its workstation Radeon Pro WX family of graphics cards.

The cards are Polaris-based, fourth-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores built on a 14nm FinFET and are being lined up for the workstation market.

The press release is full of enthusiasm that it will cure cancer, bring about world peace, but will probably settle for the less ambitious function of improved performance for computer aided design (CAD) tasks.

However it is also designed to help virtual reality developers as the cards can support for 5K-resolution high dynamic range (HDR) monitors via the DisplayPort 1.4 connector, hardware High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) encoding and decoding, and the company's TrueAudio Next VR-oriented sound processing system.

AMD's professional graphics general manager Radeon Ogi Brkic, channelling Dirk Gently, claimed that the Radeon Pro was a powerful shift towards a holistic approach to design and content creation. We guess he means that “everything is connected” although a disconnected graphics card is not exactly useful.

Brkic added that it would give customers full creative autonomy, the opportunity to realise gains across the entire ecosystem, and the ability to create free of constraint from proprietary tools.

“Our line of professional workstation graphics hardware, the Radeon Pro WX Series, is designed to empower the next-generation of exceptional content, intersecting new industry inflection points and enabling creators of all kinds to deliver the art of the impossible,” Brkic said.

We are not sure what the “art of the impossible” is. A Leonardo de Vinci done in acrylic might count or an impressionist painting a “woman with a smartphone” by Claude Monet might count.

 

The new range includes the Radeon Pro WX 4100, which has a low-profile design packing for 16 compute units and 1,024 stream processors and 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
AMD claims it has 2 TFLOPS of single-precision floating-point performance, which seems rather floppy. It can drive four 4K monitors or a single 5K monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate.

More powerful is the Radeon Pro WX 5100 which has 28 compute units, 1,792 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR5. It has 33.9 TFLOPS single-precision compute which is very floppy indeed. All this comes in a 75W thermal design profile (TDP) which is impressive.

At the top of the range there is the Radeon Pro WX 7100. It has 36 compute units for 2,304 stream processors, 8GB of GDDR5, and 5.7 TFLOPS of single-precision compute which is floppier than the UK labour party talking about Brexit. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 has been built for virtual reality developers.

US pricing for the cards has been confirmed as $399 for the WX 4100, $499 for the WX 5100, and $799 for the WX 7100. The bottom and top cards are due to launch on 10 November while the mid-range 5100 is delayed to 18 November.

Last modified on 08 November 2016
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