Radeon Pro W6800 Navi 21 32GB Card Is Likely AMD's 'Something Big' Reveal For June 8th
AMD is teasing another graphics card launch, presumably based on one of its latest generation Navi GPUs, only this time it is not meant for home consumers. On YouTube, there is an unlisted video posted by AMD that is titled "Something BIG is coming (Short)" and it appears to show a workstation graphics card. Based on other leaks, we have a pretty good idea what we're looking at.
The short video clip is only 13 seconds long and does not reveal a whole lot of details. However, the still shot you see above is clearly in the mold of a Radeon Pro graphics card aimed at workstations, with a blower-style cooler. We can see the blue shroud with a gray strip accent, which is very similar to how AMD's current generation Radeon Pro cards look like (like the Radeon Pro W5700 we reviewed), except the upcoming model is slightly tweaked.
Have a look (we pulled the above image from the 3-second mark)...
We do get a clear look at the expansion cover and display outputs towards the end of the short video. Assuming that is the final design, it looks like the card will debut with half a dozen mini DisplayPort connectors. That is the same configuration as the Radeon Pro WX9100 that is based on AMD's Vega graphics architecture.
As luck would have it, there is a new entry in the Geekbench database that purportedly came from a Radeon Pro W6800, paired with a Ryzen 9 5900X processor and 16GB of DDR4-3600 memory.
According to the database entry, the Radeon Pro W9800 features 30 compute units, a 2,554MHz top clock speed, and 32GB of video memory (presumably GDDR6). The idea has been raised that Geekbench is not reading the card correctly, and that it might actually have 60 compute units, which would arm it with 3,840 stream processors.
That is the same number of stream processors as found on the Radeon RX 6800, and it would explain why the workstation card's performance is just as good in Geekbench, and even a little bit better.
The Radeon Pro W6800 scored 137,230 in Geekbench's OpenCL test. Looking at the database's roundup of average scores for different cards, the Radeon RX 6800 scores 127,724. So going by those results, the workstation card is around 7.4 percent faster.
This is just a single benchmark, obviously, and a leaked one at that. So, we don't want to draw any conclusions here. However, this does hint at a decent performance bump for the upcoming Radeon Pro W6800 based on Navi 21. As one more point of reference, the Radeon Pro VII (Vega 20) with 60 compute units and 3,840 stream processors scores 90,017 in the same benchmark.
Look for AMD to unveil the Radeon Pro W6800 (and perhaps at least one other workstation card) on June 8 (next Tuesday).
