Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG are now available + new Professional VEGA FE drivers

[AlTech]

AMD announced Radeon Pro WX 9100 (not to be confused with previous gen Fire Pro W9100), Radeon Pro SSG Vega (not to be confused with Polaris or Fiji based SSG) back at Siggraph.

 

And now they're finally available along with new Pro drivers for both cards.

 

 

Quote

Last week, AMD quietly announced the availability of the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics (SSG), the former card shipping now and the latter shipping soon. Alongside the cards are two new Radeon Pro Software drivers for Pro WX 9100, Pro SSG, and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. The major driver, Radeon Pro Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.10, is actually the same Vega Pro driver previewed and announced earlier this summer, now bringing full Driver Options and more to the WX 9100 and Vega Frontier Edition. The other driver, 17.10.1, is the inaugural driver for the Radeon Pro SSG (Vega), and it is not clear if it includes 17.10’s new features.

 

A few hours after the publication of this article, AMD released Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Driver 17.Q4, a unified driver update that includes support for the WX 9100, SSG, and Vega Frontier Edition. This release is now the latest driver for all three, and at this time, their workstation driver download links lead to 17.Q4.

 

So yeah, and VEGA FE is also getting the new Pro drivers. I can imagine it won't get the Radeon drivers from now on and only the Pro drivers.

 

Oh and these cards aren't cheap but they're a lot cheaper than competing products from a certain green company .

 

The WX9100 has an MSRP of $2199 USD and the SSG has an MSRP of $6999 USD. Not entirely sure why the SSG has a hugely inflated MSRP but it's still probably cheaper than a competing green company product.

 

Quote

Prosumers and close readers may remember AMD’s SIGGRAPH 2017 Capsaicin event, and at the time they slated the WX 9100 and SSG for release on September 13^th, at $2199 MSRP and $6999 MSRP respectively. While it is late, the products are finally available at HPC/professional outlets and traditional retailers. SabrePC is offering the Pro WX 9100 at $1549 and Pro SSG at $4599, significantly cheaper than the original MSRP, while Newegg has the Pro WX 9100 at $1599 and the Pro SSG, due for release on October 31^st, at $6999. To be clear, the WX 9100 has already started shipping late in Q3, as noted in AMD's Q3 2017 earnings call; as for the SSG, it appears to be shipping before the end of the month, with SabrePC citing stock but a 3 - 5 day period before shipping availability, as well as Newegg's October 31^st release date.

 

 

Interesting to see they didn't go for a 4096 Bit HBM2 Stack. I fully expect them to make a 32GB HBM2 version in the future considering near the end of the Fire Pro W9100's lifecycle that it got a 32GB VRAM version.

 

 

Awesome stuff. Hope that this will allow AMD to make more awesome products in the future since their current finances with regard to Radeon Technologies Group isn't too great.

 

Source:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11968/now-shipping-radeon-pro-wx-9100-and-ssg-with-new-drivers

 

[cj09beira]

The thing about the ssg is that there is no competing product Amd is bringing a new type of product to the market and charging a premium for it. 

[captain cactus]

1 minute ago, cj09beira said:

The thing about the ssg is that there is no competing product Amd is bringing a new type of product to the market and charging a premium for it. 

Because they can, and because it's still a bazillion times faster than, lets say, a Red Rocket, which also costs $7000. So it's not even that "expensive".

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Not entirely sure why the SSG has a hugely inflated MSRP but it's still probably cheaper than a competing green company product.

It's probably not that inflated, the 2TB of NAND is likely of the highest quality and greatly over provisioned to ensure longevity. It's probably actually got 3TB-4TB raw NAND flash on it, then you've got the cost of the storage controller and design layout + manufacturing complexity.

 

WX9100 + Samsung 960 Pro 2TB + a little extra bits wouldn't be far off in terms of equivalency so that list price of $4600 mentioned is likely cutting it very close, products like these carry sweet sweet margins usually.

[AlTech]

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's probably not that inflated, the 2TB of NAND is likely of the highest quality and greatly over provisioned to ensure longevity. It's probably actually got 3TB-4TB raw NAND flash on it, then you've got the cost of the storage controller and design layout + manufacturing complexity.

 

WX9100 + Samsung 960 Pro 2TB + a little extra bits wouldn't be far off in terms of equivalency so that list price of $4600 mentioned is likely cutting it very close, products like these carry sweet sweet margins usually.

Oh. So why isn't AMD pricing it higher then?

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Oh. So why isn't AMD pricing it higher then?

Dunno, generally I trust manufacturers to price their products accordingly. They do know a lot more about the product than I do so I tend to look for justification of pricing rather than trying to question it entirely.

 

On a different note I'd love to see some more demos of the SSG at work doing the things it's said to solve, one demo isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity.

[Nup]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

On a different note I'd love to see some more demos of the SSG at work doing the things it's said to solve, one demo isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity.

Yes! That would be interesting. Seeing what kind of work needs terabyte data sets. 

[Trixanity]

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Dunno, generally I trust manufacturers to price their products accordingly. They do know a lot more about the product than I do so I tend to look for justification of pricing rather than trying to question it entirely.

 

On a different note I'd love to see some more demos of the SSG at work doing the things it's said to solve, one demo isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity.

I have heard in the rumor mill that Nvidia can deliver virtually identically performance without onboard NVMe storage effectively nullifying any advantage AMD has and that some consider their SSG product to be snake oil since it can apparently be done through a standard NVMe drive and clever software to hide whatever latency it maybe incur. 

 

Whether that's true I don't know. But I find it interesting if AMD has oversold the value of putting local storage onboard.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

I have heard in the rumor mill that Nvidia can deliver virtually identically performance without onboard NVMe storage effectively nullifying any advantage AMD has and that some consider their SSG product to be snake oil since it can apparently be done through a standard NVMe drive and clever software to hide whatever latency it maybe incur. 

 

Whether that's true I don't know. But I find it interesting if AMD has oversold the value of putting local storage onboard.

Not sure on that, some commentators don't quite fully understand how and why the flash memory is on there. There's more to it than simply caching since AMD had a previous product with flash storage on it and I'll paraphrase Red "It was shit".

 

To me it seems like a long standing genuine issue in the industry and if it was so easily solved with current hardware and software it would have been done sooner by Nvidia at the request of their customers. On the other hand nothing like a bit of competition to spur development, even if it wasn't a real deal.

[Princess Luna]

How does these cards hold up against the Quadro P5000 and Quadro P6000?

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Dunno, generally I trust manufacturers to price their products accordingly. They do know a lot more about the product than I do so I tend to look for justification of pricing rather than trying to question it entirely.

 

On a different note I'd love to see some more demos of the SSG at work doing the things it's said to solve, one demo isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity.

The SSG is the one product that LTT should be really asking AMD to sample them for some testing. It's a straight up "Holy $hit" episode, but it's the type of product that has both a big potential influence and would make good content. Linus would actually geek out over it. RED gave Raja a camera & showed up at SIGGRAPH because the CEO was blown away by it. (Hilarious Taran reaction would be worth it as well.)

 

For AMD, this is probably the most important version of Vega they're launching. Probably because for consumers, so many things went wrong about Vega, but in the professional space, AMD is producing a product sphere that Nvidia isn't. (Apparently for Ryzen, yields are great; Vega yields apparently are bad and the process node isn't great for GPUs. And then there's the driver issues.) 

 

Lastly, I think Vega SSG is leveraging the HBCC. The HBCC is quite the advanced little on-board memory management system. Considering they've only recently turned it on for RX Vega (that's where a lot of the Fall Creator's Update uplift came from), then professional Vegas launch just after, there's a good chance those parts are related. HBCC's gaming performance uplift comes from the GPU actually managing the memory in the places the Game isn't doing it so well. (It's why some games respond really well to it.) That memory management can easily be applied to other tasks and it's all done on GPU. 

[Bananasplit_00]

but can the SSG play Crysis? 

 

anyway with that dead horse out of the way its pretty cool to see new cards like this, i wonder if in like 15 years i can grab an SSG off the used market and put it in something like the Toaster....

[mynameisjuan]

Whats the speed of the SSG NAND? I just would expect it would slow down overall performance more than anything.

[Notional]

48 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

Whats the speed of the SSG NAND? I just would expect it would slow down overall performance more than anything.

Afaik it will use 2x NVME Samsung 960 Pros in RAID 0. The card will swap VRAM and SSD data when needed, so it will be insanely fast.

[mynameisjuan]

8 minutes ago, Notional said:

Afaik it will use 2x NVME Samsung 960 Pros in RAID 0. The card will swap VRAM and SSD data when needed, so it will be insanely fast.

But arent we talking about 100s of GB/s vs ~3GB/s seq? I still cant see how this will not hinder performance rather than help. I mean just to fill the 2TB would take 10+ mins. 

[Notional]

19 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

But arent we talking about 100s of GB/s vs ~3GB/s seq? I still cant see how this will not hinder performance rather than help. I mean just to fill the 2TB would take 10+ mins. 

The point is to have assets permanently loaded on the SSD's instead of the normal system drives. This means the GPU can read directly from the drives at full speed, instead of going the long (and slow) way around the rest of the system. The GPU itself will not read directly from the SSD's, but rather pull in the necessary data from the SSD's to the HBM. So the memory controller doing that will have some foresight as to what to load and when.

 

AMD showcased this on massive 3D models for a movie that was just infinitely faster than a traditional system.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

but can the SSG play Crysis? 

 

anyway with that dead horse out of the way its pretty cool to see new cards like this, i wonder if in like 15 years i can grab an SSG off the used market and put it in something like the Toaster....

Given the flash based setup, 10y old ones might have actual issues.  But it could also store a couple dozen uncompressed copies of Crysis on card, haha.

33 minutes ago, Notional said:

The point is to have assets permanently loaded on the SSD's instead of the normal system drives. This means the GPU can read directly from the drives at full speed, instead of going the long (and slow) way around the rest of the system. The GPU itself will not read directly from the SSD's, but rather pull in the necessary data from the SSD's to the HBM. So the memory controller doing that will have some foresight as to what to load and when.

 

AMD showcased this on massive 3D models for a movie that was just infinitely faster than a traditional system.

There is already talk of people using RAM Drives + Network storage over local storage because of the bandwidth issues when you start talking 20+ gig video files. Bottlenecks aren't just throughput but also latency and locality. The Vega SSG allows for so much "local" storage within the GPU's own ability to call that I frankly don't know how many other systems it's skipping. And, the funny bit, is that the SSG line will get faster as each iteration of flash storage continues to improve. (Which strikes me that Nvidia will have a similar product next generation.)

 

While definitely not a normal consumer product, there is an entire world of Video Production out there. It's big business and AMD has a fascinating product entering into it, which I'd love to know more about how well it actually performs.