Impressive as the capabilities of Radeon Pro W7900 are, the graphics card’s triple-slot design makes it more difficult to fit into workstations compared to its siblings and competing alternatives. In a move that should please performance-conscious professionals, AMD has just announced a new, thinner version of its flagship: Radeon Pro W7900DS.
Despite its smaller size, Radeon Pro W7900DS maintains the same core specifications that make its bigger brother one of the best graphics cards for AI and creative workloads. Radeon Pro W7900DS offers the same 48GB of GDDR6 memory with EEC (Error Code Correction) and 123 TFLOPs of peak half precision (FP16) performance, right down to the last ray and AI accelerators.
| Radeon Pro W7900DS specs | |
|---|---|
| GPU architecture | RDNA 3 |
| Ray accelerators | 96 |
| AI accelerators | 192 |
| Stream processors | 6,144 |
| Peak half precision (FP16) performance | 122.64 TFLOPs |
| Peak single precision matrix (FP32) performance | 61.3 TFLOPs |
| Dedicated memory size | 48GB (GDDR6) |
| Memory interface | 384-bit |
| Peak memory bandwidth | 864GB/s |
| Memory error code correction support | Yes |
Combine these specifications with its $3,499 price and Radeon Pro W7900DS looks set to bring plenty of value to the table. In fact, AMD claims that the card provides comparable performance to more-expensive alternatives like Nvidia’s RTX 5000 and 6000, despite costing considerably less.
While AMD hasn’t shared all the data from its benchmark results with us, the company says Radeon Pro W7900DS offers as much as 2.01x performance per dollar in PCMark 10 compared to RTX 6000. The card puts in similar showings in PugetBench DaVinci Resolve and SPECapc 3ds Max 2020, providing 1.99x and 1.91x increased value, respectively. SPECviewperf 4K Geomean is less impressive, at 1.52x, though, but Radeon Pro W7900DS remains the better value buy by these numbers, whichever way you cut it.
Do note, though, that Radeon Pro W7900DS and RTX 6000 are worlds apart in terms of price, as Nvidia’s workstation champ demands a kingly sum of $6,800 per card. As such, the value of Radeon Pro W7900DS should stack up quickly for those building multi-GPU workstations. On that note, AMD has qualified up to four Radeon Pro W7900DS working in tandem in a single workstation chassis.
It’s unclear how the dual-slot design impacts operating temperatures, as Radeon Pro W7900DS naturally now has less of a heatsink to keep it chilled. However, we don’t expect this to be an issue given how much headroom was afforded by the original triple-slot design. Still, it’s worth bearing in mind.
AMD will launch Radeon Pro W7900DS June 19, alongside an update to its ROCm software stack. ROCm 6.1 will introduce more AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, as well as beta support for WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
We’ve got more Computex news for you to check out, including details on the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors and AI 300 series mobile chips.
