Rounding Out RDNA 3 For Workstations

Though AMD doesn’t have any main HPC bulletins for this 12 months’s SC23 present, the corporate isn’t beginning this week empty-handed. For the workstation market the corporate is introducing its newest (and certain remaining) Radeon Professional W7000 collection card, the Radeon Professional W7700.

Primarily based on AMD’s latest-generation RDNA 3 structure, the W7700 slots in between the Navi 31-based Radeon Pro W7800 and the Navi 33-based Radeon Pro W7600. As the ultimate member of the lineup, the Navi 32-based card is designed to separate the distinction between AMD’s high-end and low-end Radeon Professional playing cards, providing a extra modest degree of efficiency for a much more modest price ticket. Priced at $999, AMD is seeking to hit a candy spot when it comes to hitting the high-end workstation market, edging out costlier NVIDIA playing cards with a mixture of upper efficiency and decrease pricing.

Underneath the hood, the Radeon Professional W7700 seems so much like a Radeon RX 7800XT that’s been dialed all the way down to make a lighter TDP. We’re taking a look at a Navi 32 GCD with simply 48 CUs enabled, and a extra modest peak clockspeed of round 2.3GHz. The whole rated throughput of the cardboard is 28.3 TFLOPS FP32, trailing the extra highly effective (and extra power-hungry) client playing cards a bit.

The Radeon Professional W7700 is paired with Navi 32’s full suite of Reminiscence Cache Dies (MCD) nonetheless, giving it a better-than-usual ratio of FLOPS to reminiscence bandwidth. With 16GB of GDDR6 connected to a 256-bit reminiscence bus, the cardboard affords 576GB/second of reminiscence bandwidth – and ECC-protected reminiscence, at that, a characteristic carried over from the high-end Radeon Professional fashions.

As famous earlier, AMD is aiming a bit extra conservatively when it comes to energy consumption for this card, seeking to provide one thing between the toasty 250W+ flagship playing cards, and the extra petite 130W W7600. The tip result’s that AMD has set the TBP for the W7700 at 190W, permitting for the development of an easily-cooled twin slot card.

By way of options, because the fifth RDNA 3 video card in AMD’s Radeon Professional lineup, the W700 is on par with its friends. Just like the flagship parts, we’re taking a look at a reasonably performant model of AMD’s RDNA 3 structure, with the corporate seeking to leverage numerous optimizations and new options all through the cardboard to supply higher efficiency, and for particular duties, new options. The core structure features a vital replace to the CUs to enhance the entire variety of compute FLOPS attainable, in addition to optimizations to enhance the sort of dense matrix math utilized in AI inference calculations. As effectively, the ray tracing models have been up to date to supply higher efficiency and a bigger general ray price.

RDNA 3’s marquee video characteristic of AV1 encoding help additionally makes it over to the cardboard as effectively. The W7700 can encode a single AV1 stream at as much as 8K60, a really helpful characteristic as AV1 adoption will increase – although it doesn’t get the extra highly effective twin media engine discovered on the flagship W7800/W7900’s playing cards.

In the meantime, AMD’s ace within the gap on the show output aspect of issues is their help for DisplayPort 2.1 connectivity, one thing all of NVIDIA’s playing cards on this technology lack. Nonetheless, Professional customers aspiring to make the most of DP 2.1 will wish to pay shut consideration to the specs for AMD’s Radeon Professional lineup, as help just isn’t constant all through the playing cards. Whereas the cheaper W7500/W7600 solely have UHBR 10 knowledge price help, the W7700 will get sooner UHBR 13.5 help for larger decision/colour depth shows. Nonetheless, it is a step down from the W7800/W7900, which might uniquely drive a max-bandwidth UHBR 20 show.

As for the bodily W7700 card itself, it’s a pretty typical-for-workstations twin slot blower design. AMD is utilizing their normal DisplayPort configuration right here, equipping the cardboard with a quartet of full-sized DisplayPorts. By way of size, the W7700 is a bit shorter than its W7800/W7900 counterparts, although AMD hasn’t despatched over the precise dimensions for the cardboard. And whereas not proven in any of AMD’s photos, the cardboard is fed further energy a single 8-pin PCIe energy connector.

Wrapping issues up, the Radeon Professional W7700 is getting a tough launch, and will probably be out there right now in stand-alone card type from the same old PC elements retailers at an MSRP of $999. In the meantime, OEMs are anticipated to start out transport the cardboard of their workstations starting later this month.