AMD Announces Radeon Pro VII Video Card

The latest video card for the professional market from AMD, the Radeon Pro VII, is produced at 7nm and has a Vega20 GPU on board. The card is equipped with 16GB of HBM2 memory and has a suggested retail price of USD 1,899.

The Radeon Pro VII has to compete with Nvidia’s more expensive Quadro RTX 5000 card and could even compete with the Quadro GV100 or GP100 on some fronts. AMD has three primary markets or scenarios in mind for the card: simulations during the design phase of products or processes, video production for TV and media, and computation in supercomputers or HPCs in general. With its low pricing, the Radeon Pro 7 should be more accessible to smaller businesses. The competing RTX 5000 cards cost $2299 and the GV100 $8900. According to AMD, the Radeon Pro 7 is roughly fifty percent faster than the former card in some benchmarks and in other benchmarks the card would score about equal.

Compared to Nvidia’s GP100 card, the Radeon Pro VII has a faster interface thanks to pci-e gen4 lanes and the double precision computing power is said to be between the GP100 and GV100. AMD makes the card based on a Vega20 chip with sixty activated compute units, good for 3840 stream processors. The card has 16GB of HBM2 memory on board, good for a bandwidth of more than 1TB/s. The single precision computing power is 13.1Tflops and with double precision it is 6.5Tflops. The card features six mini-dp version 1.4 connectors, but it can run in crossfire with a bridge, or one FirePro S400 Sync Module can drive a cluster of four cards to power more displays.

The card is still based on AMD’s older gcn architecture and not on the new Navi architecture, such as the consumer cards in the 5000 series. The Radeon Pro VII is very reminiscent of the Radeon VII consumer card introduced at the beginning of last year; the specifications are almost identical. The TDP is 250W and as the name implies, the GPU is produced at 7nm. The Radeon Pro VII has a suggested retail price of USD 1,899, converted with VAT that would be about 2100 euros. The Infinity Fabric links cost $199 and are available as two- or three-slot connectors.