AMD’s latest Capsaicin event was focused entirely on the professional market last night, and they’ve summarily updated their pro GPU line with new Polaris-based GPUs to help accelerate any workload you might have.
FireGL and FirePro have been re-imagined as Radeon Pro
The pro line of GPUs has been renamed into something more fitting and more in line with the naming scheme they chose for their consumer cards. Now AMD is using the prefix WX to indicate their pro line. They also changed the color scheme from the typical, dull black to a new blue pigment. That alone has a rather interesting story, having been created by accident in a lab at Oregon State University. The so-called YInMnBlue is actually a sight to behold, though perhaps a bit similar to the blue found on Intel’s PCIe accelerator cards.
Radeon Pro WX 4100 is designed for small form factor workstations and should provide good performance in a half-height sized card. It has 16 CUs enabled and up to 8GB of VRAM. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 is ideal for real-time content engines and immersive real-time design and manufacturing, including CAD and CAM. This has 24 CUs enabled with up to 8GB of VRAM. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 is the top of the line card that was introduced and is fully capable for design engineering and media and entertainment, whether video editing or image creation, and is AMD’s workstation solution for professional VR content creation. This has 32 CUs enabled and up to 8GB of VRAM available to it.
These are all Polaris, or GCN 4.0 GPUs and thus have all the benefits and improvements therein. Being so small, and relatively cool-running you might even be able to use seven of of the Radeon Pro WX 7100 in an mGPU setup. mGPU for rendering can take advantage of as much GPU horsepower as is available, though VRAM is still separate. This could allow for quite the powerhouse of a rendering platform.
Interestingly, AMD is saying that these are affordable workstation solutions, meaning the price, which is as of yet unannounced, could be similar to their non-pro counterparts.