AMD releases the Radeon Pro Duo

[DocSwag]

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10279/amd-releases-radeon-pro-duo-fiji-350w-vr

 

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The AMD Radeon Pro Duo was first announced back in March, with the card is being marketed for VR content creation first and foremost. With this card, AMD is promoting the ability to allocate one GPU per eye while powering VR experiences. This way the case is opened up for performance beyond what any other single card can offer today. Another use case for developers is offloading compute work to the second GPU while the first is used for graphical work which can make for a much smoother experience during demanding a workflow.

 

AMD GPU Specification Comparison
	AMD Radeon Pro Duo	AMD Radeon R9 Fury X	AMD Radeon R9 Fury	AMD Radeon R9 295X2
Stream Processors	2 x 4096	4096	3584	2 x 2816
Texture Units	2 x 256	256	224	2 x 176
ROPs	2 x 64	64	64	2 x 64
Boost Clock	1000MHz	1050MHz	1000MHz	1018MHz
Memory Clock	1Gbps HBM	1Gbps HBM	1Gbps HBM	5Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	2 x 4096-bit	4096-bit	4096-bit	2 x 512-bit
VRAM	2 x 4GB	4GB	4GB	2 x 4GB
FP64	1/16	1/16	1/16	1/8
TrueAudio	Y	Y	Y	Y
Transistor Count	2 x 8.9B	8.9B	8.9B	2 x 6.2B
Typical Board Power	350W	275W	275W	500W
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	GCN 1.2	GCN 1.2	GCN 1.2	GCN 1.1
GPU	Fiji	Fiji	Fiji	Hawaii
Launch Date	Q2 2016	06/24/2015	07/14/2015	04/21/2014
Launch Price	$1499	$649	$549	$1499

 

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The Radeon Pro Duo is essentially and effectively two Radeon R9 Nanos together on a single PCB. At a high level, the Pro Duo should give us up to twice the performance at twice the power consumption (plus a bit extra for PCIe switches). To remove heat, the card comes with a closed loop cooler similar to that found on AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X. This cooler, unlike the one found on the R9 295X2, provides a complete liquid cooling solution covering the VRMs on both GPUs along with the GPUs themselves. For reference, the pipes on this one are 540 mm long, and the double-thick radiator with fan comes in at 63 mm

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Moving past the cooling solution we get three full sized DisplayPort connectors and one full-size HDMI port. On the side of the card there are three 8-pin PCIe power connectors which will do more than an adequate job of supplying the rated 350W power draw. Note that 350W is the equivalent of dual R9 Nano cards (rated at 175W a piece), and will be clocked similarly. The reactive frequency adjustments to heavily loading, by inference, are likely to be similar but we expect AMD to be using low-power binned parts for their new high-end card.

So AMD has finally released the pro duo, and it looks like are making it two nanos that are watercooled. My guess is that the power limit is 525 watts. All we've learned today is the power draw is 350 watts. Tbh, I don't think this card is worth it at all at 1500. If it decreases in price, however, like the 295x2, ti could become a worth buying card.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

So AMD has finally released the pro duo, and it looks like are making it two nanos that are watercooled. My guess is that the power limit is 525 watts. All we've learned today is the power draw is 350 watts. Tbh, I don't think this card is worth it at all at 1500. If it decreases in price, however, like the 295x2, ti could become a worth buying card.

It's not a worth buying card right now, and it definitely will not be either once pascal and polaris get released in a few months...

[Fulgrim]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

It's not a worth buying card right now, and it definitely will not be either once pascal and polaris get released in a few months...

Unless you're a rich bastard.

 

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, Fulgrim said:

Unless you're a rich bastard.

 

in which case you would buy two duo pros for a few months and then upgrade

[samcool55]

50 minutes ago, Enderman said:

It's not a worth buying card right now, and it definitely will not be either once pascal and polaris get released in a few months...

For gamers, yea probably not a good idea.

But it is marketed as a card that can do content creation and gaming.

The only thing that i can think of that's similar is the Titan series.

And it has certified drivers that are designed for content creation like the FirePro cards have.

[kcaBsIsuxeN]

53 minutes ago, Fulgrim said:

Unless you're a rich bastard.

 

I still WANT IT.

[kcaBsIsuxeN]

I mean seriously.  Look at it..  Have to wonder about the single 120mm(?) though.  Even if the rad is twice as thick..

 

 

[patrickjp93]

21 minutes ago, kcaBsIsuxeN said:

I mean seriously.  Look at it..  Have to wonder about the single 120mm(?) though.  Even if the rad is twice as thick..

 

 

If it's a HardwareLabs Black Ice GTX, or an Alphacool Monsta, it can handle two Nanos pretty well.

[TheRandomness]

1 hour ago, DocSwag said:

-snips-

When suddenly the price drops to sub £750 and everyone buys it instead of the 980Ti.

[kcaBsIsuxeN]

11 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

If it's a HardwareLabs Black Ice GTX, or an Alphacool Monsta, it can handle two Nanos pretty well.

Fair enough.  Wonder about noise too though regarding the pressure the fan has to deal with pushing/pulling air through that very wide rad?

[patrickjp93]

Just now, kcaBsIsuxeN said:

Fair enough.  Wonder about noise too though regarding the pressure the fan has to deal with pushing/pulling air through that very wide rad?

Given the fan is a Gentle Typhoon, it's the best that you can get, at least until Noctua figures out its active noise dampening tech for its fans.

[Megahurt]

It's basically 2 Nanos, the only case where it would make some kind of sense is in an mITX build. Still a cool card, just not worth the asking price, so if that goes down eventually, it will be a lot more sensible.

[DocSwag]

3 hours ago, Enderman said:

It's not a worth buying card right now, and it definitely will not be either once pascal and polaris get released in a few months...

Well, if it drops to like 600-700 dollars after they release....

Then again, that seems a bit unlikely. 

[mikat]

as linus said on the wan show, it doesn't have a place in the current market since developers aren't always optimizing for SLI, it's 300 bucks extra for an extra PCI-E slot, and developers want to use what their customers (gamers) are using

[DocSwag]

2 minutes ago, mikat said:

as linus said on the wan show, it doesn't have a place in the current market since developers aren't always optimizing for SLI, it's 300 bucks extra for an extra PCI-E slot, and developers want to use what their customers (gamers) are using

Number one: It's crossfire not SLI

Number 2: AMD has stated that this card is highly targeted at the VR Developer/workstation market, and not as much at gamers. If you ask me, this makes sense (except for the high price tag). In a workstation the two GPUs will definitely help a lot at accelerating work. For VR developers, it has been talked about for a long time about having each GPU render one eye. This GPU would therefore allow developers to optimize for this technique. 

 

Still though, if you ask me I don't see why people can't just purchase two Fury X's. It costs less too.

[patrickjp93]

6 minutes ago, ninninon said:

AMD do dual gpu cards properly...

With a closed loop using a (likely) noisy, slow pump and a single radiator that likely will allow 0 overclocking? Thanks but no thanks. Give me a cheap air solution, shave off $200, and let me do it myself.

[mikat]

7 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Number one: It's crossfire not SLI

Number 2: AMD has stated that this card is highly targeted at the VR Developer/workstation market, and not as much at gamers. If you ask me, this makes sense (except for the high price tag). In a workstation the two GPUs will definitely help a lot at accelerating work. For VR developers, it has been talked about for a long time about having each GPU render one eye. This GPU would therefore allow developers to optimize for this technique. 

 

Still though, if you ask me I don't see why people can't just purchase two Fury X's. It costs less too.

a developer in twitch chat said that he wants to use the hardware that the gamers use because he wants to know how it runs on the gamer's pc

and SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, and Crossfire is a Scalable Link Interface  

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, mikat said:

a developer in twitch chat said that he wants to use the hardware that the gamers use because he wants to know how it runs on the gamer's pc

and SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, and Crossfire is a Scalable Link Interface  

ah I see.

[Tomsen]

18 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Number 2: AMD has stated that this card is highly targeted at the VR Developer/workstation market, and not as much at gamers. If you ask me, this makes sense (except for the high price tag). In a workstation the two GPUs will definitely help a lot at accelerating work. For VR developers, it has been talked about for a long time about having each GPU render one eye. This GPU would therefore allow developers to optimize for this technique. 

 

Still though, if you ask me I don't see why people can't just purchase two Fury X's. It costs less too.

This seems to go over peoples head. They have clearly stated this will be a prosumer card targeted towards VR developers. They even delayed its launch to wait for VR gear to be ready. The issue might be the message doesn't arrive to all intact.

 

9 minutes ago, mikat said:

and SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, and Crossfire is a Scalable Link Interface  

SLI is Nvidias technology for multi-GPU.

Crossfire is AMDs technology for multi-GPU.

 

You could essentially just switch the roles, and call nvidias crossfire if you would.

EDIT: To explain further, like how gtx is now considered a synonym for GPUs, so are SLI, atleast for the masses

[mikat]

2 minutes ago, Tomsen said:

 

SLI is Nvidias technology for multi-GPU.

Crossfire is AMDs technology for multi-GPU.

 

You could essentially just switch the roles, and call nvidias crossfire if you would.

I know, but i forgot to put crossfire, but you know what i meant

[patrickjp93]

19 minutes ago, ninninon said:

True, but they do put two fully fledged gpu's on a single board. 

So was the Titan Z.

[mikat]

5 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

So was the Titan Z.

and everyone knows how much that card sucked lol

[Enderman]

26 minutes ago, mikat said:

a developer in twitch chat said that he wants to use the hardware that the gamers use because he wants to know how it runs on the gamer's pc

and SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, and Crossfire is a Scalable Link Interface  

then the developer should use a 970 or other mid-low end hardware which is what 99% of gamer use

not a $1500 GPU

plus if a developer optimized for a $1500 GPu then nobody would buy the game because it would run like crap on everyones hardware

 

btw SLI is for nvidia and CFX is for AMD

CFX is not Scalable Link Interface

[mikat]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

then the developer should use a 970 or other mid-low end hardware which is what 99% of gamer use

not a $1500 GPU

plus if a developer optimized for a $1500 GPu then nobody would buy the game because it would run like crap on everyones hardware

 

btw SLI is for nvidia and CFX is for AMD

that's what i meant (pro duo is useless) and i know the diffrence between SLI and CFX but i just forgot to put CFX

[spartaman64]

3 hours ago, Tomsen said:

This seems to go over peoples head. They have clearly stated this will be a prosumer card targeted towards VR developers. They even delayed its launch to wait for VR gear to be ready. The issue might be the message doesn't arrive to all intact.

 

SLI is Nvidias technology for multi-GPU.

Crossfire is AMDs technology for multi-GPU.

 

You could essentially just switch the roles, and call nvidias crossfire if you would.

EDIT: To explain further, like how gtx is now considered a synonym for GPUs, so are SLI, atleast for the masses

the technology is called SLI like how cuda cores are stream processors