Adding a new graphics card to their portfolio, AMD today announced the Radeon Pro Duo that is based on dual Polaris 10 GPUs. With this powerful card, the company is targeting the pro users and the content creators.
The launch comes just a week after AMD announced its Radeon RX 500 series which were also based on Polaris architecture instead of the highly-anticipated Vega architecture. A total of four graphics cards were announced under the series and they are designed to cater the lower to mid-range segment.
But AMD is going for a more professional approach with this Radeon Pro Duo. This graphics card is a direct update to the Radeon Pro Duo launched last year that came with dual Fiji GPUs instead of dual Polaris 10 GPUs in the new one. The high-end professionals involved in broadcasting, entertainment, media, design, etc. will be able to utilise the GPU better.
Coming to the specifications of the Radeon Pro Duo, it comes two full Polaris 10 cores with 2304 stream processors each, which totals to 72 compute units and 4608 stream processors. With its clock speed of 1243 MHZ on both the GPUs, the total compute power of the card is 11.45 TFLOPs, which is significantly lower than 16 TFLOPs of the original Radeon Pro Duo.
When it comes to VRAM, the new Radeon Pro Duo is ahead of its predecessor by leaps and bounds. The yesteryear’s card came with an 8GB HBM2 memory, while the one announced today houses 32GB of GDDR5 memory and there is a possibility that AMD is using the 7GHz chips which bring a bandwidth of 448GB/s. It is powered by an 8+6 pin power configuration, confirming its wattage of 250W.
“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. 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. It’s a continuation of our promise for Radeon Pro: to provide greater choice in how professionals practice their craft, enabling superior multi-tasking, accelerated applications, and powerful solutions for advanced workloads like VR,” said Ogi Brkic, general manager, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.
If you remember, the Fiji-based Radeon Pro Duo launched last year was priced at $1,500 in the US. This time, AMD is being much more aggressive with its pricing and has announced that the new card will retail for just $999.
The AMD Radeon Pro Duo was announced today at the NAB Show 2017 and we can expect it to hit the shelves by May.