Radeon Pro W5700 expands Navi’s reach from playing games to making them

AMD is laying claim to the world's first 7nm professional workstation graphics card, the Radeon Pro W5700. As such, it's not meant for playing games, though it has the capability to do so. More importantly, it has the chops to help develop them and work on other professional workloads.

You might be wondering, what about the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 cards? Both of those housed 7nm Vega 20 GPUs, but AMD's boasting with its Radeon Pro W5700 comes from differentiating between server/datacenter accelerators (Radeon Instinct) and professional workstation cards (Radeon Pro). So, fair enough.

Even without that distinction, the Radeon Pro W5700 is the first instance of AMD's current generation Navi GPU and underlying Radeon DNA (RDNA) architecture extending out of the consumer gaming realm and into another market. Or as our friends at AnandTech cleverly put it, Navi just got drafted to the pros.

The Radeon Pro W5700 is basically a workstation variant of the Radeon RX 5700. Here's a run down of the core specs:

• Stream processors—2,304
• Compute units—36
• Base frequency—1,183MHz
• Boost frequency—up to 1,930MHz
• Memory—8GB GDDR6
• Memory interface—256-bit
• Memory bandwidth—448GB/s
• TDP—205W
• Price—$799

Boost clocks are a bit higher than the 5700, but with a lower base frequency, which is typical of professional GPUs. This translates into 8.89 TFLOPs of peak single precision (FP32) performance, and 556 GFLOPs of peak double precision (FP64) performance.

Both of those numbers fall slightly below the Radeon Pro WX 8200 (Vega), which offers up to 10.8 TFLOPs and 620 GFLOPs of FP32 and FP64 performance, respectively. That's also a more expensive part—it launched at $999 in September 2018. But the new architecture should keep the two pretty close, if it's anything like the consumer RX 5700 vs. Radeon VII.

According to AMD, the Navi-infused Radeon Pro W5700 offers up to 25 percent more performance per clock and up to 41 percent higher average performance per watt than the previous generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

"We designed the AMD Radeon Pro W5700 to deliver significant performance gains in top design and manufacturing applications. Architects, designers, and engineers now have the horsepower to drive demanding real-time and VR experiences, enabling a better and faster design creation process," said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group.

The card will find its way to retail shelves today. Giving the timing of the release, it's probably not bound for any Black Friday deals, though we expect plenty of gaming cards will be.