AMD announced Wednesday the Radeon Pro VII, a high-end graphics card aimed at professional workstations, with reportedly up to 26% faster 8K image processing using Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve.
The new card will likely be available as a standalone option for those interested in using it with the Mac Pro in the future.
The card is based on AMD’s Vega 20 GPU, which was launched in late 2018. It’s the company’s first 7-nanometer card in the Pro lineup, aside from the Pro Vega II found exclusively in the Mac Pro since last June. In March of 2019, Apple made available the Pro Vega 64X upgrade option in the iMac Pro.
The Radeon Pro VII offers up to 16GB of HBM2 memory with up to 1TB of memory bandwidth, up to 6.5 TFLOPs of performance, and support for high-bandwidth PCIe 4.0.
AMD said the card offers up to 5.6 times the performance-per-dollar versus the competition in internal testing.
The card also supports AMD’s Infinity Fabric Link technology, a high-bandwidth, low-latency connection that allows memory sharing between two AMD Radeon Pro VII GPUs.
“AMD Radeon Pro VII-equipped workstations are expected to be available in the second half of 2020 from leading OEM partners,” the company said.
Just from AMDs numbers alone, it doesn’t appear the new model is as fast as Radeon Pro Vega II, but it also doesn’t require buying a Mac Pro and comes out much cheaper at $1,899.
The only question mark is whether in the near future it will work in the Mac Pro or third party external Graphics Processor Units. A number of previous models ultimately were supported.
