AMD Unveils Radeon Pro WX and Pro SSG Professional Graphics Cards (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD took the wraps off its latest pro graphics solutions at SIGGRAPH today, and announced three new professional graphics cards in the new Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX Series. The Radeon Pro WX 4100 is the entry-level model with a half-height design for use in small form-factor workstations. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 is the middle child, while the Radeon Pro WX 7100 is AMD's current top-end WX model. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 has 32 compute units, offers 5 TFLOPs of compute performance, and is backed by 8GB of GDDR4 memory over a 256-bit memory interface. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 offers 28 compute units and 4 TFLOPs of performance along with 8GB memory over the same 256-bit interface, and the Radeon Pro WX 4100 is comprised of 16 compute units at 2 TFLOPs of perf with 4GB memory over a 128-bit memory link. The Radeon Pro WX 4100 has four mini DisplayPort outputs, while the Radeon Pro WX 5100 and 7100 each have four full-size DisplayPort connectors. None of these cards will be giving the new NVIDIA Quadro P6000 a run for its money in terms of performance, but they don't have to. The Quadro card will no doubt cost thousands of dollars, while the Radeon Pro WX 7100 will eek in at just under $1,000. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 and 4100 will slot in somewhat below that mark. AMD also announced the Radeon Solid State Storage Architecture and the Radeon Pro SSG card today. Details are scant, but AMD is essentially outfitting Radeon Pro SSG cards with large amounts of Solid State Flash Memory, which can allow much larger data sets to reside close to the GPU in an extended frame buffer. Whereas the highest-end professional graphics cards today may have up to 24GB of memory, the Radeon Pro SSG will start with 1TB, linked to the GPU via a custom PCI Express interface. Giving the GPU access to a large, local data repository should offer significantly increased performance for demanding workloads like real-time post-production of 8K video, high-resolution rendering, VR content creation and others.

Comments

Re:Slashdot is for fags. And fags go MOOOOOOO!

[JRV31]

Is that why you're here?

I'm stoked. Just four of these cards in parallel

[Snufu]

and I'll finally be able to run Crysis. On low settings.

Welcome to 2014

[Billly Gates]

The poloris based 480x is slower than Nvidia's cheapest 1060 card for $75 more. Nvidia just released the most advanced graphics card just yesterday

Re:Welcome to 2014

[thoper]

you mean the AMD card is slower than a more expensive NVIDIA card? im SHOCKED!, SHOCKED I tell ya!.

Re:Welcome to 2014

[Freedom Bug]

What's more shocking is that it's only slower on DX11 games. DX12 games with async compute and Vulkan games are faster on the cheaper AMD card. And I don't know about you, but when I buy a video card, I care more about next year's games than last year's games.

Re:Welcome to 2014

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's no such thing as "poloris", there's no "480x", and the closest thing to those two that exists is not $75 more expensive than the 1060.

Re:Welcome to 2014

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, it also tends to be the case that older games have lesser requirements so they're more likely to be more playable anyway.

Re:Welcome to 2014

[epine]

Punch bug!

X just released the most advanced Y yesterday.

We used to play this game in the seventies where if you were the first person to spot a VW Beetle, you got to punch the person beside you in the side of their arm.

The CMOS transistor was invented in the year of my birth (I guess I'm dating myself) and had a good fifty year run, now officially ended with even the IEEE is publishing articles pronouncing "the industry roadmap is dead, Jim". For pretty much the whole of that time, whatever was announced yesterday was pretty much guaranteed to leapfrog any product announced six months prior. Of course, this was always accompanied by the fanfare of snivellers announcing that Red (or Green) was back in the saddle, on top of the world, once again.

Now we're at the top of the CMOS maturity curve, where the old leapfrog game is no longer the dominant paradigm. Anyone determining fitness of purpose by some aggregated synthetic benchmark is not long for this world, as an employed person. Take Nvidia, for example, which benchmarks at 0 fps after you drill out the binary blob. How much else does that synthetic benchmark not capture?

One wonders, too, how the future trolls will continue to employ themselves. Having to preface your post with an explanation of a cultural meme from the 1970s will likely take some starch out of the activity.

What's an old troll supposed to do, as this grand old steamship empties out? After younger and more vigorous trolls have established themselves on Twitter or—gasp—Snapchat?

Old Man Billy Goatee probably sticks around and fires up that old-timey radio normally reserved for sending S-O-S calls in distant corners of the world where time stands still, to tap out in Morse code "X just released the most advanced Y yesterday", hoping against nostalgic hope that some isolated South Pacific islander loses his shit, and spends an entire week jamming every ham channel available with irrepressible indignant outrage.

Here's another thing. Period costumes are pricey to maintain. They need to be dry-cleaned regularly, or soon they begin to smell.

Re:Welcome to 2014

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You mean the MOS transistor, surely? I mean, seeing that CMOS is a particular type of MOS gate, not a transistor. (Granted, it's just a four year difference, but still...)

Re:Welcome to 2014

[Type44Q]

when I buy a video card, I care more about next year's games than last year's games

When next year's games will almost certainly run optimally on video cards from two years from now??

No cross fire? or this that link being used by sto

[Joe_Dragon]

No cross fire? or this that link being used by storage?

Uhh... Why 8k video?

[TheDarkMaster]

Why work with 8k video when we barely have content in 4k and equipment to display 4k?

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[110010001000]

Because marketing, and since 8k doesn't exist they don't have to prove that it really works.

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[cdrudge]

Because it's a lot easier for something that can do 8K video to do 4K, then something that can do 4K to do 8K.

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[110010001000]

And this is why marketing works...people actually believe that.

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rendering CGI for motion pictures uses 8K.

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[cdrudge]

I'm not sure that I follow. Are you saying that something that can do 4K can do 8K equally as well? Or that something that can do 8K would struggle doing 4K. In what way is marketing trying to be deceiving here?

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[donaldm]

Because marketing, and since 8k doesn't exist they don't have to prove that it really works.

I beg to differ. 8K TV's will be available this year although they won't be cheap so if you want to purchase one I would recommend a wait of 2 to 5 years unless you have money to burn. Of course, like 4K which has little content 8K is going to be even worse initially.

What people fail to realise it is not the resolution that is paramount but a combination of display resolution, display size, display refresh rate (in Hz) and the distance the viewer is to the screen. The following site has more details.

Re:Uhh... Why 8k video?

[donaldm]

Because it's a lot easier for something that can do 8K video to do 4K, then something that can do 4K to do 8K.

Where did you get that idea? If you have an 8k display it will most likely be able to display the following content 8k (obviously), 4k, 1080p, 1080i, 720p and standard definition. A 4k display will not be able to display 8k content although it may be able to down-convert 8k content so it can be displayed on an 4k display.

It is important to note that 8k TV's are due out this year but displays will be very expensive.

Re: Uhh... Why 8k video?

[cdrudge]

You might want to tell the movies that were scanned to 8k from film (search for 8K) that they don't exist, as well as this mainstream movie that's being filmed in 8K. Or this company that the videos they record on their cameras don't exist. Hell, Youtube has an 8K video already.

8K video availability is very limited, but not no-existant. 8K displays have been shown at CES since 2012. 8K broadcasts were tested during the 2012 Olympics. But even without commonly available video for mortals, 8K video isn't the only thing that you can display with a video card that can display 8K. You can drive four 4K displays, which is an amazing coincidence that these cards have 4 ports for output!

Re: Uhh... Why 8k video?

[Blaskowicz]

Movies may be shot at 8K, but they'll likely be cropped and edited and downsampled to 4K.
8K for the end user? Useless, unless it's a huge wall monitor that you walk up to in order to view more detail / zoom into something. May have military or spying applications, or for studying behavior in a flock of 1000 penguins.

Re: Uhh... Why 8k video?

[cdrudge]

Movies may be shot at 8K, but they'll likely be cropped and edited and downsampled to 4K.

Hmm. Edited in 8K and then downsampled. Interesting. So what you're saying is that...there would be a need for a 8K video card then?

8K for the end user? Useless...

I think I'll add your quote to my prophetic computer quotes database:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981
"8K for the end user? Useless..." - Blaskowicz, random Slashdot user, 2016

Re: Uhh... Why 8k video?

[Blaskowicz]

Things can be both commercially successful and useless, such as cars with a 500hp engine, or most powerful motorcycles.
More glaringly, audio files sold at 96KHz and 192KHz, a scam so ingrained that most brands pay lip service to it.

Rendering becomes more realistic

[Bruce Perens]

1 TB local storage means that you can have an accurate environment map and do reflections and lighting effects properly in a photorealistic render.

Re:Rendering becomes more realistic

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Besides bandwidth, I wonder about the real latency figures. Spatial trees with fat nodes, anyone? It's not just graphics these days. (Also, OLAP? Kx/Kdb+ implementations or analogues? Ideas abound...)

Re:Game changer

[sexconker]

Every so often this innovative company just changes the game. Don't you wish you bough their stock when it hit $1.8?

I wish I hadn't sold my tens of thousands of shares, with an aggregate cost basis around $2, in December of 2015.
Feel free to look the chart up and laugh at me.

(I only sold it because I moved to a different platform and it required liquidating everything.)

Gaming VS Workstation is Marketing Bullshit

[BrendaEM]

They take a gaming chip, sometimes put ECC memory on it, don't bottleneck the 2D in the drivers, strip the cooler to the bare minimum, now costs 3 times as much.
Fuck you marketing people, fuck you very much!