AMD Launches Polaris-Based Radeon Pro Duo 11.45 TFLOPS Professional Graphics Card
AMD has a new graphics card on deck to handle rigorous workloads, and the company is billing it as the world’s first dual-GPU aimed at the professional market. The Radeon Pro Duo features dual Polaris GPUs and according to AMD makes a perfect fit for “media and entertainment, broadcast, and design and manufacturing workflows”.
The Radeon Pro Duo is in essence two Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPUs (5.7 TFLOPS) incorporated into a single board. As you might expect, combined performance scales nicely to 11.45 TFLOPS. And instead of just 8GB of GDDR5 RAM onboard (as you would find with the Radeon Pro WX 7100), the new Radeon Pro Duo drops the hammer with 32GB of GDDR5. Whereas a single Radeon Pro WX 7100 draws 130W of power, the Radeon Pro Duo understandably nearly doubles that to 250W.
According to AMD, the Radeon Pro Duo allows creative professionals to drive up to four 4K monitors at once (at 60HZ), or a single 8K monitor at 30Hz using a single DisplayPort 1.4 cable. If you use two cables, the maximum refresh rate for an 8K monitor doubles to 60Hz. It should be noted, however, that you won’t find too many 8K monitors on the market these days, with the most prominent one being of course the 32-inch Dell UltraSharp 32 (UP3218K). That monitor alone will set you back $4,999.
"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,” said Ogi Brkic, AMD General Manager for Professional Graphics in the Radeon Technologies Group. “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.”
The Radeon Pro Duo, which was announced today at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB 2017) show in Las Vegas, is priced at $999 and will be available at the end of May. It will be in fierce competition with other high-end GPUs like the NVIDIA Titan Xp and Pascal-based Quadro professional graphics cards.
It should be noted that this new Radeon Pro Duo is not related to the consumer-centric Radeon Pro Duo that was launched last year. That graphics card featured two 28nm Fiji GPUs, 8GB of HBM memory, a staggering 16 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance and came bundled with a watercooler.
