AMD Unveils Radeon Pro W7900DS GPU For Monstrous Multi-GPU Power
The Radeon Pro W7900 has a similar GPU configuration to the consumer-class Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with the same 96 unified compute units, for a total of 6,144 shaders, with peak throughput of 61 TFLOPs. That’s where the similarities end between the two cards end, though. The Radeon Pro W7900 has a slightly lower total board power (295W vs. 355W), a triple-slot cooling solution, and a healthy 48GB of VRAM. That triple-slot cooling solution on the Radeon Pro W7900, however, precluded the card from being used in multi-GPU configurations in the vast majority of workstations, which is where the just-announced Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot comes in.
The Original Radeon Pro W7900 Requires Three Slots
At Computex 2024, AMD announced the Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot, or DS. As its name suggests this new card is fundamentally similar to the original Radeon Pro W7900, but features an updated cooling solution and case bracket that are only two slots wide. The Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot has the same board power, specs, and features as the original, but thanks to its slimmer cooler, up to four of these cards can be used in a typical professional workstation with a full-tower chassis. The design of the original card, which has triple-slot case bracket meant that, at best, only two cards could be used in a standard system. Two original Radeon Pro W7900s effectively consumed 6 slots in a system.
In terms of its display outputs, DisplayPort 2.1 support in the current-gen Radeon Pros gives the cards the ability to output high-resolution display streams up to 12K60, using compression, or 8K60 without it. It also can do 8K120, and power a wide array of high-refresh, or multi-display 4K configurations. The actual outputs consist of a trio of full-sized DisplayPorts, along with a single mini-DP.
Although we don’t have confirmation, AMD is likely using a more aggressive fan profile, a higher-performing vapor chamber, or both, to keep the new Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot cool versus its wider sibling. Regardless, with its smaller form factor, the Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot affords AMD’s system partners additional flexibility to produce some extremely powerful workstations for advanced content creators or AI developers.
Up to four Radeon Pro 7900DS cards can be installed in a full-tower workstation, for a grand total of 192GB of VRAM and 244TFLOPs of compute performance. That kind of memory capacity and compute performance allows for massive LLMs to run on a single system with good performance. We should also note that the new Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot will be supported by AMD’s ROCm 6.1 for Radeon GPUs, which was also announced today.
Pricing on the Radeon Pro W7900 Dual Slot with 48GB of VRAM will be $3,499, which is $500 below the introductory price of the original, and cards will be availble in just a couple of weeks on June 19. That price also significantly undercuts NVIDIA's RTX 6000 Ada Generation, which is the most comparable model in NVIDIA’s current line-up.
