Monday, April 24th 2017
AMD Announces New Radeon Pro Duo - Polaris x2
Today AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the world's first dual-GPU graphics card designed for professionals: the Polaris-architecture-based Radeon Pro Duo. Built on the capabilities of the Radeon Pro WX 7100, the Radeon Pro Duo professional graphics card is designed to excel at media and entertainment, broadcast, and design and manufacturing workflows, delivering outstanding performance and superior flexibility that today's creative professionals demand.
The Radeon Pro Duo is equipped with 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory to handle larger data sets, more intricate 3D models, higher resolution videos, and complex assemblies with ease. Operating at a max power of 250W, the Radeon Pro Duo harnesses a total of 72 compute units (4608 stream processors) for a combined performance of up to 11.45 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance on one board, and twice the geometry throughput of the Radeon Pro WX 7100. The Radeon Pro Duo enables professionals to work up to four 4K monitors at 60Hz, drive the latest 8K single monitor display at 30Hz using a single cable, or drive an 8K display at 60Hz using a dual cable solution."Today's professional workflows continue to increase in complexity, often demanding that creators switch between a wide variety of applications to progress their work, pausing efforts in one application while computing resources are focused on another. We designed the Radeon Pro Duo to eliminate those constraints, empowering professionals to multi-task without compromise, dedicating GPU resources where and how they need them. It's a continuation of our promise for Radeon Pro: to provide greater choice in how professionals practice their craft, enabling superior multi-tasking, accelerated applications, and powerful solutions for advanced workloads like VR," said Ogi Brkic, general manager, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.
Divide
The Radeon Pro Duo's distinct dual-GPU design gives professionals the flexibility to divide and conquer their workloads, enabling smooth multi-tasking between applications by committing GPU resources to each. Professionals can maintain their creative momentum and get more done faster, allowing for a greater number of design iterations in the same time.
"I was very impressed with the power of the Radeon Pro Duo, particularly in Nuke. The flexibility of being able to divide GPUs between tasks is phenomenal and represents the ultimate in multitasking: compositing a complex shot while jumping into a 3D application to create assets, exporting back to Nuke to keep compositing then switching to Photoshop or Mari and paint a projection, to load it back into Nuke and continue. The Radeon Pro Duo handles the general and varied tasks without missing a beat with excellent 3D performance. For the kind of projects I undertake as a generalist, the Radeon Pro Duo is a no-brainer. It does it all," said Kynan Stephenson, freelance artist.
Accelerate
The Radeon Pro Duo dramatically increases performance in today's most popular professional applications through support of multiple GPUs or plug-ins, speeding through tasks. On select professional applications, the Radeon Pro Duo delivers up to 2 times faster performance compared with the Radeon Pro WX 71003 and up to 2 times faster performance than the closest competing professional graphics card.
Create
The Radeon Pro Duo's potent combination of performance and dual-GPU flexibility makes it the ideal solution for today's advanced workloads, including professional VR content creation. VR represents a significant inflection point for the media and entertainment industry and is becoming more commonplace in today's studios. Radeon Pro Duo professional graphics card leverages the power of two GPUs to render out separate images for each eye, increasing VR performance over single GPU solutions by up to 50% in the SteamVR test.4 AMD's LiquidVR technologies are also supported by the industry's leading real-time engines, including Unity and Unreal, to help ensure smooth, comfortable, and responsive VR experiences on Radeon Pro Duo.
"In developing 4K 360 VR content, the biggest hurdle is the tech, because as an artist, I just want to create and not worry about limitations of the hardware. Faced with raw, un-optimized content, VR creators need a lot more horsepower than VR consumers. With the new Radeon Pro Duo, I have performance in spades. I immediately saw a speed difference of up to 2X, allowing me to push the boundaries of my projects without having to compromise on creativity or productivity," said Jonathan Winbush, Founder & Creative Director, Winbush.tv.
The Radeon Pro Duo is designed to meet the stringent requirements of workstation form factors, comes with 24/7 support5, and is bolstered by professional-grade software certified across leading applications for media, entertainment, CAD and engineering. Radeon Pro Software offers users unprecedented driver stability, quality and reliability, with quarterly updates for features, performance and stability.
The Radeon Pro Duo's planned availability is the end of May at an expected SEP of US$999.
The Radeon Pro Duo is equipped with 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory to handle larger data sets, more intricate 3D models, higher resolution videos, and complex assemblies with ease. Operating at a max power of 250W, the Radeon Pro Duo harnesses a total of 72 compute units (4608 stream processors) for a combined performance of up to 11.45 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance on one board, and twice the geometry throughput of the Radeon Pro WX 7100. The Radeon Pro Duo enables professionals to work up to four 4K monitors at 60Hz, drive the latest 8K single monitor display at 30Hz using a single cable, or drive an 8K display at 60Hz using a dual cable solution."Today's professional workflows continue to increase in complexity, often demanding that creators switch between a wide variety of applications to progress their work, pausing efforts in one application while computing resources are focused on another. We designed the Radeon Pro Duo to eliminate those constraints, empowering professionals to multi-task without compromise, dedicating GPU resources where and how they need them. It's a continuation of our promise for Radeon Pro: to provide greater choice in how professionals practice their craft, enabling superior multi-tasking, accelerated applications, and powerful solutions for advanced workloads like VR," said Ogi Brkic, general manager, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.
Divide
The Radeon Pro Duo's distinct dual-GPU design gives professionals the flexibility to divide and conquer their workloads, enabling smooth multi-tasking between applications by committing GPU resources to each. Professionals can maintain their creative momentum and get more done faster, allowing for a greater number of design iterations in the same time.
"I was very impressed with the power of the Radeon Pro Duo, particularly in Nuke. The flexibility of being able to divide GPUs between tasks is phenomenal and represents the ultimate in multitasking: compositing a complex shot while jumping into a 3D application to create assets, exporting back to Nuke to keep compositing then switching to Photoshop or Mari and paint a projection, to load it back into Nuke and continue. The Radeon Pro Duo handles the general and varied tasks without missing a beat with excellent 3D performance. For the kind of projects I undertake as a generalist, the Radeon Pro Duo is a no-brainer. It does it all," said Kynan Stephenson, freelance artist.
Accelerate
The Radeon Pro Duo dramatically increases performance in today's most popular professional applications through support of multiple GPUs or plug-ins, speeding through tasks. On select professional applications, the Radeon Pro Duo delivers up to 2 times faster performance compared with the Radeon Pro WX 71003 and up to 2 times faster performance than the closest competing professional graphics card.
Create
The Radeon Pro Duo's potent combination of performance and dual-GPU flexibility makes it the ideal solution for today's advanced workloads, including professional VR content creation. VR represents a significant inflection point for the media and entertainment industry and is becoming more commonplace in today's studios. Radeon Pro Duo professional graphics card leverages the power of two GPUs to render out separate images for each eye, increasing VR performance over single GPU solutions by up to 50% in the SteamVR test.4 AMD's LiquidVR technologies are also supported by the industry's leading real-time engines, including Unity and Unreal, to help ensure smooth, comfortable, and responsive VR experiences on Radeon Pro Duo.
"In developing 4K 360 VR content, the biggest hurdle is the tech, because as an artist, I just want to create and not worry about limitations of the hardware. Faced with raw, un-optimized content, VR creators need a lot more horsepower than VR consumers. With the new Radeon Pro Duo, I have performance in spades. I immediately saw a speed difference of up to 2X, allowing me to push the boundaries of my projects without having to compromise on creativity or productivity," said Jonathan Winbush, Founder & Creative Director, Winbush.tv.
The Radeon Pro Duo is designed to meet the stringent requirements of workstation form factors, comes with 24/7 support5, and is bolstered by professional-grade software certified across leading applications for media, entertainment, CAD and engineering. Radeon Pro Software offers users unprecedented driver stability, quality and reliability, with quarterly updates for features, performance and stability.
The Radeon Pro Duo's planned availability is the end of May at an expected SEP of US$999.
59 Comments on AMD Announces New Radeon Pro Duo - Polaris x2
Vega is a reboot of Radeon brand. Somewhat similar to what HD7000 did to Radeon products years ago.
In short, I hypothesize that AMD has completely scraped VEGA off the road map
And it had to be priced lower than gtx 1070 to make sense.
AMD would loose a lot of money on every single one they sell.
For Pro Duo they can charge more..
If it was something that would outperform 1080ti they might sell at a loss just for the claim.
We can do without the FUD.
1750 memory
www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2953/radeon-pro-duo
They have demoed a WORKING card with VEGA onboard several month ago during RyZen Launch event. That means VEGA in design is already finalized. Whatever performance coming after that can only be driver optimization.
1. If VEGA is good, I mean 1080Ti good. They should have released it not long after 1080Ti release. This way plus a lower price at least AMD can capture some of the highend market share.
2. If VEGA is not good, like 1070~1080 performance. Then AMD is in some seriously awkward situation. Because VEGA is huge and have very expensive HBM2 onboard. Performance is not there to justify the cost of production and possible high price tag.
From this long period of silence from AMD's PR. My best guess is the 2nd scenario may be true. They over hyped VEGA with their "poor volta". Now the best they can do is scrap up some rebradeon 480 and call them 580. VEGA is gonna be a big flop, even worse than FuryX. It will still be GCN with minor tweaks, which in no way would it be able to compete with nvidia's current Pascal/Volta.
I still think Vega will be coming. It's just not suitable for a dual GPU (for TDP and power reasons which are completely to be expected).
The Vega has been planned for 1H 2017 for ages, so there is no way they were not prepared and they just blindly released those because they already had them in the pipeline.
Even without beating the 1080ti it would still be a compute monster as they allow packed math on consumer cards giving you double half precision performance. Nvidia only does this on the p100 so vega WILL be faster at all deep learning applications other than the p100. The cache controller allows it to use memory in a unique way that should allow for interesting implementations, perhaps sdk around that is what is slowing launch.
I want vega to do well, but what's the holdup? Supposedly it will launch in may but we shall see.
I have been working on a small VR demo. Getting any help from AMD is impossible. Their tech department never respond to any emails. Their tech support line knows nothing about their own LiquidVR.