Slimmed down board helps make AMD’s flagship workstation GPU a viable option for multi-GPU workflows, including AI
AMD has slimmed down its flagship professional workstation GPU, the AMD Radeon Pro W7900 (read our review), introducing a new dual slot version of the board.
The new AMD Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot (DS) looks to be identical in terms of specifications – 48 GB of GDDR6 ECC memory, 123 TFLOPs of FP16 peak half precision performance and a total board power of 295 W. However, the new design overcomes one of the major limitations of the original triple slot card – that of density in workstations.
In many workstations, it was only possible to add a single board, effectively ruling out the Radeon Pro W7900 as an option for those seeking multi-GPU configurations.
With the new AMD Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot, AMD says it has qualified the use of up to four cards in a single workstation chassis.
AMD is pitching the Radeon Pro W7900 DS as a cost-effective alternative to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, which also comes with 48 GB of memory.
Priced at $3,499, AMD claims the GPU offers close to 2x performance per dollar in digital content creation applications including Autodesk 3ds Max and DaVinci Resolve.
AMD is also highlighting the GPU’s credentials for Generative AI workflows. With the forthcoming AMD ROCm 6.1 open compute software stack for Radeon GPUs, AMD says it will be possible to develop for more AI frameworks, thanks to the addition of TensorFlow. ROCm 6.1 also supports multi-GPU and come with beta support for Windows.
