AMD Announces New Radeon Pro Duo - Polaris x2

[Raevenlord]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ratirt]

Pro duo again? Is that a good solution? Honestly i don't think so but i might be wrong.

 

[Patriot]

Pro duo again? Is that a good solution? Honestly i don't think so but i might be wrong.

Yeah.... this is not giving me high hopes about vega...

 

[RejZoR]

It's strange they haven't made a RX580 X2 with RX480 clocks and 16GB of VRAM for the price point of a bit under GTX 1080. That could easily eat into the GTX 1080 segment. But strangely, they haven't done that.

 

[natr0n]

More all seeing eye bullshit.

 

[RejZoR]

Yeah.... this is not giving me high hopes about vega...

Why people keep throwing in RX Vega into discussions and have doubts about it? Vega is NOTHING you've seen so far. Everything about Vega is new. This isn't Tonga made bigger. Or Fiji shrunk down. Or Polaris made bigger. This is Vega. The ground zero for new generation. It's what will trickle down from full fat Vega is what will replace current Polaris in the upcoming months. Anyone who actually checked the known specs and known slides and explanations/interviews should understand that.
Vega is a reboot of Radeon brand. Somewhat similar to what HD7000 did to Radeon products years ago.

 

[xkm1948]

AMD choose this timing to do new Pro Duo with 480 GPU. This could only means VEGA is a big fat failure. What might have happened is AMD was shocked with the performance and release speed of both 1080Ti and Xp. VEGA may only compete with 1080 in certain selected games. At the same time HBM2 and a big die costs way too much to manufacture.

In short, I hypothesize that AMD has completely scraped VEGA off the road map

 

[r9]

It's strange they haven't made a RX580 X2 with RX480 clocks and 16GB of VRAM for the price point of a bit under GTX 1080. That could easily eat into the GTX 1080 segment. But strangely, they haven't done that.

It would barely match gtx 1070 and those 2x580 would be expensive to produce double the VRAM and all.
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.

 

[m1dg3t]

Interesting, I wonder how well it offloads/transfers between GPUs. Any word on the RAM speed, is it 11Gbps stuff or???

 

[m1dg3t]

AMD choose this timing to do new Pro Duo with 480 GPU. This could only means VEGA is a big fat failure. What might have happened is AMD was shocked with the performance and release speed of both 1080Ti and Xp. VEGA may only compete with 1080 in certain selected games. At the same time HBM2 and a big die costs way too much to manufacture.

In short, I hypothesize that AMD has completely scraped VEGA off the road map

Proof? You realise this is entry level stuff, right?

We can do without the FUD.

 

[T4C Fantasy]

Interesting, I wonder how well it offloads/transfers between GPUs. Any word on the RAM speed, is it 11Gbps stuff or???

1243 core
1750 memory

 

[RejZoR]

AMD is being super silent on Vega intentionally. Just look how scared NVIDIA is, releasing faster cards for no reason lol. A Ti card and two Titans. It's interesting they keep leaks so tightly secured for this one...

 

[Patriot]

Why people keep throwing in RX Vega into discussions and have doubts about it? Vega is NOTHING you've seen so far. Everything about Vega is new. This isn't Tonga made bigger. Or Fiji shrunk down. Or Polaris made bigger. This is Vega. The ground zero for new generation. It's what will trickle down from full fat Vega is what will replace current Polaris in the upcoming months. Anyone who actually checked the known specs and known slides and explanations/interviews should understand that.
Vega is a reboot of Radeon brand. Somewhat similar to what HD7000 did to Radeon products years ago.

Yawn... Vega is supposed to be 12Tflops... Why would you make a dual gpu card that falls short of that right before vega releases? You either make this card obsolete very quickly or vega isn't going to hit 12Tflops.

 

[Patriot]

AMD is being super silent on Vega intentionally. Just look how scared NVIDIA is, releasing faster cards for no reason lol. A Ti card and two Titans. It's interesting they keep leaks so tightly secured for this one...

I honestly think they have been selling a butload to liquidsky and that is why the consumer version is late.

 

[T4C Fantasy]

Yawn... Vega is supposed to be 12Tflops... Why would you make a dual gpu card that falls short of that right before vega releases? You either make this card obsolete very quickly or vega isn't going to hit 12Tflops.

i honestly dont see a 4096 shader core amd card reaching 1500 clock to reach that 12tflop goal

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2953/radeon-pro-duo

 

[xkm1948]

Basic Logic:

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.

 

[kruk]

Yawn... Vega is supposed to be 12Tflops... Why would you make a dual gpu card that falls short of that right before vega releases? You either make this card obsolete very quickly or vega isn't going to hit 12Tflops.

They cannot make that much profit with Fury Pro Duo or single Vega as they do with this card. Vega's performance is irrelevant here.

 

[xkm1948]

AMD is being super silent on Vega intentionally. Just look how scared NVIDIA is, releasing faster cards for no reason lol. A Ti card and two Titans. It's interesting they keep leaks so tightly secured for this one...

Nvidia is capitalizing on ZERO competition from AMD.

 

[the54thvoid]

AMD choose this timing to do new Pro Duo with 480 GPU. This could only means VEGA is a big fat failure. What might have happened is AMD was shocked with the performance and release speed of both 1080Ti and Xp. VEGA may only compete with 1080 in certain selected games. At the same time HBM2 and a big die costs way too much to manufacture.

In short, I hypothesize that AMD has completely scraped VEGA off the road map

Radeon Pro Duo was 2 Nano GPU equivalents I think. They can't use Vega for this because it's not out yet. Also, the power envelope would be quite high given Vega's high end status. Nvidia have given up on dual cards and AMD probably figure the same with the high end. I don't think Vega is off the map, I think AMD needed a higher end card for the professional market and a dual GPU can be tuned and drivers written to fit that purpose. It's not been released as a gaming card so the software environment can be more forgiving.

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).

 

[xkm1948]

AMD's LiquidVR implementation as well as many of their promised technology failed to deliver, not once or twice, but every single f*ucking times. It is amazing their graphic department is still operating.

 

[the54thvoid]

AMD's LiquidVR implementation as well as many of their promised technology failed to deliver, not once or twice, but every single f*ucking times. It is amazing their graphic department is still operating.

That's a pity. I recall you were stoked with your Fury X. But then, VR has kinda slumped in general.

 

[owen10578]

It would barely match gtx 1070 and those 2x580 would be expensive to produce double the VRAM and all.
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.

Actually im easily beating a 1080 with dual 480s and even the 1080Ti when overclocked...well in benches. Games I don't really know so it might very well be 1070 speeds in non optimized ones. A dual 480/580 gaming card would be pretty cool though. But im not sure it would even sell considering there are just as fast if not faster nvidia single cards.

AMD choose this timing to do new Pro Duo with 480 GPU. This could only means VEGA is a big fat failure. What might have happened is AMD was shocked with the performance and release speed of both 1080Ti and Xp. VEGA may only compete with 1080 in certain selected games. At the same time HBM2 and a big die costs way too much to manufacture.

In short, I hypothesize that AMD has completely scraped VEGA off the road map

Why all the hate? It's not even out yet ffs. I don't really see how AMD should be shocked by the Ti or Xp considering the original XP was out for a long time already...also the same way HBM increase costs adding traces for GDDR memory on the pcb also adds cost so not sure that HBM2 "cost way too much". Not saying Vega will be great, if anything im a bit skeptical considering how quiet AMD is but we can do without the bashing and baseless speculation.

 

[m1dg3t]

AMD is being super silent on Vega intentionally. Just look how scared NVIDIA is, releasing faster cards for no reason lol. A Ti card and two Titans. It's interesting they keep leaks so tightly secured for this one...

I don't know about scared, more like pre-emptive tactics. AMD's being definitely tight lipped as of late. They seem to be taking the same approach as Ryzen, actually more reticent IMHO.

Yawn... Vega is supposed to be 12Tflops... Why would you make a dual gpu card that falls short of that right before vega releases? You either make this card obsolete very quickly or vega isn't going to hit 12Tflops.

You realize any hard numbers we have so far re:Vega were from qualification silicon using Fury drivers?

 

[RejZoR]

Nvidia is capitalizing on ZERO competition from AMD.

Is it? Capitalizing would be selling GTX 1080 for same price for longer. Not releasing Ti for no real reason and ANOTHER Titan. Again, for no real reason. They are just tossing out money, making their expensive cards redundant. They could go reactive, if AMD released Vega and it proved to be unusually faster, they could respond with Ti or new Titan and take the crown from there in a moment.

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.

 

[Patriot]

Actually im easily beating a 1080 with dual 480s and even the 1080Ti when overclocked...well in benches. Games I don't really know so it might very well be 1070 speeds in non optimized ones. A dual 480/580 gamung card would be pretty cool though. But im not sure it would even sell considering there are just as fast if not fast nvidia single cards.



Why all the hate? It's not even out yet ffs. I don't really see how AMD should be shocked by the Ti or Xp considering the original XP was out for a long time already...also the same way HBM increase costs adding traces for GDDR memory on the pcb also adds cost so not sure that HBM2 "cost way too much". Not saying Vega will be great, if anything im a bit skeptical considering how quiet AMD is but we can do without the bashing and baseless speculation.

This isn't hate, this is speculation based on unusual silence. I doubt anyone here wants AMD to do poorly but we don't understand why they keep demoing it and hyping without releasing it. They are likely working on a fix for something but some transparency would be nice.

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.