AMD Takes Aim at High Performance Computing with the RADEON PRO VII

AMD has been creating waves in the processor space for a few years now; dropping the gauntlet for its competitors when it comes to their Ryzen processors and also their RADEON graphics cards. The company is also expanding their reach to mobile in a collaborative effort with Samsung to bring their RDNA architecture to mobile processors.

That said, the company has long been working at providing compute capabilities to the industry as well. While they haven’t had a single product geared at taking on the market directly, their products have been used and optimised for years. This year, AMD is filling the void with their new AMD RADEON PRO VII graphics processor.

The new AMD RADEON PRO VII graphics processor uses AMD’s VEGA 20 architecture to help deliver top class performance at a more affordable price point for the industry. In fact, the new PRO VII comes in at about 25% of the price of competing products. This allows companies and workforces to free valuable resources for other functions.

With the new PRO VII, AMD looks to address the increasing demand for simulation workloads. The new card is capable of up to 6.5 TFLOPS of double precision performance and is equipped with 16GB of HBM (High bandwidth memory) to help process compute and simulation tasks more efficiently and at a faster pace. In fact, the RADEON PRO VII has about 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. This allows it to handle even more complex models and datasheets and even enables more efficient 8K broadcasting. It also runs at lower temperatures compared to the competition allowing it to function at high capacity for longer durations.

The RADEON PRO VII also supports AMD’s Infinity Fabric Link which allows two GPUs to share memory resources for bigger project workloads. The new GPU is also built with security in mind with hardware validated boot.

Software Geared for Professionals

Together with the announcement of the RADEON PRO VII, AMD also highlighted their continual support for industry and professional applications with their commitment to providing stable, industry grade software. The company announced the availability of Professional drivers which will be updated regularly. In addition, their software will have Day-0 certification from relevant parties to ensure that programs are stable and compatible for professionals. This certification process will be ongoing and will be applied to every update.

In the same vein, AMD also announced that their RADEON ProRender will have a more simplified licensing model to enable more widespread adoption. The company will be using the APACHE based licensing format to streamline licensing and ease adoption among professionals. At launch, the ProRender 2.0 is supported by Unreal, SideFX, Autodesk Maya and Blender.