AMD Announces Radeon Pro W5700: Navi Gets Drafted to The Pros

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Taking a break from their recent run of consumer-focused video card launches, this morning AMD is turning their attention to the professional side of the market. With their new Navi GPUs and the underlying RDNA architecture in hand, the company is now looking to apply that technology to their workstation video cards, which have been and continue to be an important facet of AMD’s overall GPU business. To that end, today AMD is announcing the first Navi-based Radeon Pro card, the Radeon Pro W5700.

From a high level perspective, the W5700 can be thought of as the workstation analog to AMD’s consumer Radeon RX 5700 (XT). And indeed, that’s even the direction AMD is taking with the entire Radeon Pro W series lineup. Starting with this generation, AMD’s model numbers are now going to match their consumer part numbers, beginning with the W5700 and presumably being fleshed out farther down the line to include the likes of the W5500 and W5300. This follows years of using names like W9000, WX9100, and WX 9100, which have been wholly detached from the rest of AMD’s video cards.

For AMD, the change in naming and positioning comes as the company is looking to build on the goodwill from and the messaging they’ve already done for the RDNA architecture as part of the Radeon RX 5000 series launch. RDNA is the heart and soul of AMD’s current generation and future generation GPUs, and AMD wants potential customers across all of their markets knowing that, and what RDNA brings to the table.

Though make no mistake, the card’s product number may have “5700” in it and specifications close to the RX 5700 series, but it’s still very much its own card. AMD has developed a separate board just for the W5700, with specific accommodations just for the workstation market, so while the naming is aligned, AMD isn’t just slapping a coat of blue trim on an RX 5700.

At any rate, AMD is looking to use Navi and the RDNA architecture to do for workstation graphics what it’s already done for consumer graphics: significantly boost AMD’s performance and power efficiency through the combination of RDNA and TSMC’s 7nm process.

Briefly, RDNA incorporates a number of changes to AMD’s core GPU architecture in a bid to improve IPC and the resulting efficiency – to get more work done out of its wide array of compute/shader hardware, and to do so while consuming less power. The biggest advancement here is a roughly 25% improvement in IPC over the Vega (GCN 5) architecture. Which combined with the other changes gives the W5700 a 41% perf-per-watt advantage over the last-generation WX 8200, according to AMD. RDNA also brings several other changes to AMD’s hardware that improve its efficiency and overall throughput, including a reworked geometry engine, an updated display engine block, and PCIe 4.0 compatibility.
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