AMD Radeon Pro Duo Features New PCB Design
AMD unveiled the Radeon Pro Duo 8GB video card last night and now that we’ve gotten some sleep we noticed something this morning that we didn’t catch last night. The new Radeon Pro Duo, the $1499 graphics card designed for “creators who game, and gamers who create,” has been completely redesigned since we last saw it in June 2015.
The still features two fully enabled 28nm ‘Fiji’ GPUs that each have 4,096 stream processors, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 4 GB of HBM memory. Thanks to the Capsaicin event last night we also now know for certain that this card has 16 TFLOP/s total single-precision floating-point performance. AMD clearly beefed up the power management components on the board and went from two 8-pin PCIe connectors to three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. AMD has said that the Radeon Pro Duo would be rated at 350W.
Based on the near complete redesign of the the PCB it is pretty evident that AMD wasn’t just sitting on this card for the past 6+ months and that a redesign was needed for one reason or another. The card might have 8GB of memory, but it’s not shared and each GPU has access to only 4GB of memory. The biggest downside to this $1500 graphics card is the fact that it has just 4GB of HBM memory available and that will likely be the bottleneck on a super high-end card like this. For VR development though that might not matter too much as you can basically dedicate one Fiji GPU per eye with AFR to help push the non-4K displays that are used in current VR headsets.
The Radeon Pro Duo features a liquid-cooling solution designed by Cooler Master with what appears to be the same exact 120mm radiator that is used on the Radeon R9 FuryX. When it comes to video outputs the Radeon Pro Duo has three standard sized DisplayPort 1.2a ports and one HDMI 1.4a connector.
Inside the card features a rather complex looking water cooling solution by Cooler Master. Hopefully the folks at Cooler Master have worked out their patent issues with Asetek and that won’t cause any launch delays or issues down the road. It looks like AMD and Cooler Master have crammed all they could inside this card with two GPU water blocks and four tubes routing the water over the GPUs and VRM components. It might be easier to create a full coverage water block and just have the pump with the radiator for future products.
Is the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 dead? We aren’t sure, but AMD could come out with an air cooled version of this card with lower clock speeds if they really wanted to. Maybe that is what the other PCB design is? They also might be strategically holding that back to spoil something NVIDIA is working on.