AMD Announces Brawny Radeon Pro W5500, W5500M Navi Workstation GPUs For Professional Creators
AMD is indicating that in the case of the Radeon Pro W5500, it offers a 25 percent uplift in performance-per-clock compared to its GCN-based Radeon Pro predecessors. The company is also touting up to 32 percent lower power consumption figures versus the competition from NVIDIA. If that wasn't enough, it's also being claimed that the Radeon Pro W5500 delivers a 10x improvement in application workstation performance compared to its NVIDIA rivals in SPECviewperf 13 multitasking loads. However, that's just one cherry-picked benchmark, so we'll be eager to see what the complete picture is once we are able to test these new GPUs in-house.
Since these are Navi-based cards, they are both built on AMD's current 7nm process tech. The Radeon Pro W5500 uses the PCIe 4.0 interface bringing 22 compute units to the table along with 1408 stream processors. It promises FP32 compute performance of 5.35 TFLOPs, and offers up to 8GB GDDR6 memory.
As for the Radeon Pro W5500M, it also features 22 compute units, and although it isn't specified, we're assuming that it has the same number of stream processors as the desktop-based Radeon Pro W5500. The Radeon Pro W5500M makes do with just 4GB of GDDR6 memory, and its peak compute performance is a bit lower at 4.79 TFLOPs. This is likely attributable to lower clock speeds to keep power in check within a laptop chassis. That would also explain why the Radeon Pro 5500 features a TDP of 125W, while the Radeon Pro W5500M has a TDP of just 85W.
“The AMD Radeon Pro W5500 graphics card delivers exceptional power efficiency and leadership performance for 2D and 3D design applications, enabling them to better visualize and interact with their designs in real time, explore new immersive workflows like virtual reality and maximize productivity," said Scott Herkelman, Corporate VP and GM for the Radeon Technologies Group.
AMD says that the Radeon Pro W5500 will be available in the coming days from its retail partners priced at $399. The Radeon Pro W5500M, however, will begin shipping in mobile workstations in Spring 2020.
