AMD led off its Vega assault by releasing two Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards at the very end of last month. The Frontier cards were aimed at a prosumer market in between the gaming-focused RX Vega and the true professional cards with certified drivers and similar perks. The red team has finally announced a pair of cards for the pro market: the traditional Radeon Pro WX 9100 and the new Radeon Pro SSG with 2 TB of solid-state storage on board.
The manufacturer says the Radeon Pro WX 9100 delivers up to 12.3 TFLOPS of single-precision performance and 24.6 TFLOPS of half-precision compute capability. The WX 9100 has 16 GB of 945 MHz HBM2 ECC memory on the same package as the GPU core, providing up to 484 GB/s of bandwidth. That WX9100's core contains the full complement of 64 Vega "Next Compute Units" and 4096 stream processors. That fleet of SPs operates at a boost clock of 1500 MHz. The base clock was not provided.
Pro users with their eyes on big pictures will likely appreciate the WX 9100's next-generation connectivity options. The card offers support for an 8K (7680×4320) display at up to 60 Hz, 4K (3840×2160) screens at 120 Hz, and support for up to six total displays through six mini-DisplayPorts.
Some members of the hardware enthusiast community were disappointed back in 2015 when AMD's Radeon R9 Fury cards were limited to a mere 4 GB of on-package memory. Some of the Radeon Technology Group's biggest customers must have had a need for a lot more memory. Last year's Fiji-powered Radeon Pro SSG piled 1 TB of solid-state storage on top of that 4 GB of HBM memory.
This year's Vega Radeon Pro SSG has 16 GB of ECC HBM2 and 2 TB of on-card NAND flash memory, managed by the Vega architecture's High Bandwidth Cache Controller. AMD says the SSG cards are intended to ease the limitations that current-generation hardware and storage impose on content creators working with 8K video footage and other enormous data sets in real time. The Radeon Pro SSG has the same performance specifications as the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and has the same I/O cluster with six mini-DisplayPorts.
AMD backs up the Radeon Pro WX 9100 card with a three-year standard warranty, which buyers can extend to up to seven years. The Radeon Pro SSG's warranty has a shorter two-year term, possibly owing to the limited lifespan of NAND flash memory. The company says the impressive hardware comes coupled with improved Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Drivers, which are updated the fourth Thursday of each calendar quarter. Both cards are expected to ship on September 13. The Radeon Pro WX 9100 will sell for $2199 and the unique Vega Radeon Pro SSG will set buyers back an eye-watering $6999.