Today AMD is launching a new GPU based on its Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon Pro W5700 is designed to bring the company’s newest architecture to the $750-1000 professional workstation market. AMD does not currently have a great answer in its portfolio for the higher-end market segment where one may see NVIDIA cards such as the Titan RTX or Quadro RTX 8000 (review is in our publishing queue.) Still, AMD released a view that shows why it thinks it can be impactful in the market at a $799 price point.

Setting the Stage with Market Numbers

AMD’s pre-brief on the card included JPR market figures that put the 2018 workstation discrete GPU market at around 3.6 million units. We love when vendors provide this kind of data in their briefings.

AMD’s contention is that even if it is unable to really address the high-end with the current Navi generation, it is only losing out on 1% of the unit volume. You are right to also read that chart as the 1% makes up a larger share by revenue. AMD is not targeting the lower end where the AMD Radeon PRO WX 4100 and AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 sit, but a bit higher in the stack toward the mid-range. With that context, AMD is launching the Radeon Pro W5700.

AMD Radeon Pro W5700 Key Specs

Here are the key specs for the card:

There are a few key specs that really stick out. First, with 36 compute units, 448GB/s of memory bandwidth and 8GB of GDDR6 memory, this card looks a lot like the AMD Radeon RX 5700. It is unlikely the “5700” in both model numbers is a coincidence.

One will also see a much more robust display output array utilizing mini-DP which differentiates the card over its consumer counterpart. AMD is also adopting USB-C like we have seen NVIDIA embrace for newer VR headsets. We were a bit surprised that this card only has 8GB of memory as a bump to 16GB, for example, would have created more differentiation.

Final Words

AMD is claiming 40% better performance than its previous generation along with gains over the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000. One of the reasons we are not posting the RTX 4000 comparisons that AMD provided is that the RTX 4000 is a single-width card while the AMD Radeon Pro W5700 is a dual-width card.

For those that rely upon the AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise and AMD ProRender, this is the Navi generation card that will let you access those software stacks.