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RadeonProFeature1

Update: Sources at AMD have told us that the Radeon Pro Duo'south depression TDP (for a dual-GPU card) is because the GPU uses two Radeon Nano-grade GPUs, rather than Fury X-derived parts. This explains the TDP calculation.

Six weeks ago, AMD announced its Radeon Pro Duo GPU, a dual graphics solution based on the company's 28nm Fiji graphics chip. The Radeon Pro Duo is formally launching today, at a absurd $ane,500, simply it'south explicitly intended for VR developers and isn't expected to be bachelor in wide production.

However, $ane,500 GPUs don't launch every twenty-four hour period, then let'south take a await at what AMD has cooked upwardly here.

RadeonPro-Naked

The Radeon Pro Duo, sans shroud or heatsinks.

The Radeon Pro Duo is a standard dual GPU pattern at the board level. The two GPUs are continued by a PCI Express bridge (the PLX 8747, which provides 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity — x16 for each graphics card, and an x16 lane for the motherboard). Nosotros don't have the verbal physical dimensions of the board, merely the PCB is significantly smaller than you'd expect for a dual graphics carte du jour thank you to the utilize of HBM memory.

Formal specs on the GPU itself are beneath:

ProductSpecs

As expected, the Radeon Pro Duo is a "full" Fury X implementation and doubles up on the compute units, texture units, and ROPs. Top-end clock speed is listed as "upwardly to" 1GHz, and the bill of fare'south rated TDP is supposedly 350W.

This is a little odd, to say the to the lowest degree. The original Fury X had a list TDP of 275W and two eight-pin PCI Limited power connectors to power the card. 350W is but 27% more power consumption than 275W, despite adding a third eight-pivot PCI Limited connector (each PCIe 8-pivot is capable of providing up to 150W of boosted power).

Our guess is that the GPU is capable of cartoon substantially more than 350W over cursory periods of time, simply that AMD set its thermal and power guidance at that point and will throttle the GPU to go on it in that specification. This might explain why the company didn't ship a consumer variant of the menu — simply as Nvidia's Titan Z was never every bit fast as 2 Titan Black's due to lower constructive clock rates on the GPU, the Radeon Pro Duo may non striking the sustained frequency targets necessary to beat a Fury X in Crossfire.

Why launch the Radeon Pro Duo at all?

The point behind the Radeon Pro Duo is to drive developer engagement and go more game authors thinking about using multiple GPUs for VR rendering. Dedicating i GPU to each heart is a natural fit for VR, and the multi-GPU rendering methods introduced in DX12 make information technology much easier to support this kind of offload.

AMD likewise wants to make a more serious play for the professional graphics evolution sphere. While VR doesn't direct tie to the company's FirePro division, if VR content gets hot in the adjacent few years, it could see worthwhile dividends from staking out an early position in this market place.

CrytekPartnership

Consumers are going to want to want to wait-and-encounter what the summer (and Polaris) deliver. Just if y'all're a developer wanting to work in VR, and create software that can run at acme performance on multi-GPU systems, the Radeon Pro Duo is meant to appeal to you. Niche products like this tin pay large dividends if they shift the conversation effectually an emerging market, and that's apparently what AMD is hoping will happen with this GPU.