Sure, the GPU shortage sucks. But AMD is still going ahead and introducing two new desktop graphics cards, this time for workstations.
On Tuesday, the company announced the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 and the W6600. The two cards are targeting professional users, who need a graphics card to run 3D simulations or image editing programs.
The Radeon Pro W6800 is supposed to be available now on e-commerce sites, but we haven’t found it. The other issue is the price: The W6800 is going to start at $2,249, making it an insane purchase for a normal retail consumer.
But in return, you get a graphics card with a whopping 32GB of GDDR6 video memory — or double what’s found in the Radeon RX 6900 XT, a GPU that starts at $999. You can also attach up to six 5K monitors to the card via an array of Mini DisplayPort 1.4 slots.
The Radeon Pro W6600, on the other hand, is slated to land in the third quarter, starting at $649. It only contains 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, putting it below the 16GB of memory found in the Radeon RX 6800, which retails for $579.
But according to AMD, the W6600 has been optimized to run many applications and workloads simultaneously. The card also features four DisplayPort 1.4 slots.
The two products use the same technology found in AMD’s gaming graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6000 series, which began selling back in November. Both the W6800 and W6600 contain the company’s RDNA 2 architecture. The GPUs have also been built with TSMC’s 7-nanometer manufacturing process.
AMD didn’t benchmark the cards against the gaming-focused Radeon RX 6000 series. So it’s hard to determine the performance differences. But according to the company, the new hardware is up to 79 percent faster than AMD’s last generation Radeon Pro 5000 GPUs.
Alongside the desktop cards, AMD is also preparing to launch a new Radeon Pro GPU for laptops. The mobile-focused W6600M seems to have the exact same specs as the desktop version. It’s slated to arrive in the HP Fury ZBook G8 mobile workstation, which will go on sale in select markets in July.
