Thursday, August 4th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

AMD unveils Radeon Pro WX 7100, 5100 and 4100 GPUs

AMD has unveiled its new line-up of mid-to-high-end workstation-class GPUs for graphics professionals: the Radeon Pro WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100. The new cards were announced at Siggraph 2016 last week.

Rebranded from FirePro to Radeon Pro
The line-up represents a change of branding for AMD, with the new Radeon Pro WX-series cards replacing its old FirePro W7100, W5100 and W4100 cards.

The move unites both AMD’s gaming and professional workstation cards under the Radeon brand.

So far, AMD hasn’t announced replacements for the other cards in the FirePro W-series: the top-of-the-range W9100 and W8100, and the entry-level W2100.

160804_AMDRadeonFireProWX7100
The new Radeon Pro WX 7100. AMD has rebranded its latest workstation-class graphics cards from the FirePro W-series to the Radeon Pro WX-series, and has changed the cards’ signature colour from red to blue.

Mid-to-high-end cards for professional graphics work
Like their predecessors, the Radeon Pro WX-series cards are intended for professional CAD and DCC work, with the WX 7100 pitched as AMD’s solution for for VR content creation.

The WX 7100 and WX 5100 are full-height cards; the WX 4100 is intended for small form factor workstations.

Roughly twice the GPU compute power of the old FirePro W-series cards
The main change in the new cards is the move to AMD’s new Polaris GPU architecture, with a resulting increase in the number of GPU Stream processors and core clock speed.

For the WX 7100, that means a peak single-precision floating-point GPU compute performance of “over 5 Tflops”, up from 3.3 Tflops for the W7100.

The other two cards represent even larger relative increases over their predecessors: over 4 Tflops for the WX 5100 versus 1.43 Tflops for the W5100, and over 2 Tflops for the WX 4100 versus 0.6 Tflops for the W4100.

Doubled graphics RAM – at least for the WX 5100 and WX 4100
On-board memory has also been doubled for the two lower-end Radeon Pro cards: the WX 5100 features 8GB GDDR5 memory as opposed to 4GB for the W5100, and the WX 4100 features 4GB versus 2GB for the W4100.

There’s no change with the higher-end card: both the new Radeon Pro WX 7100 and the old FirePro W7100 feature 8GB GDDR5 memory.

Incremental updates to other specs
AMD hasn’t disclosed full specs for the new cards yet, but the ones we do know look like incremental updates.

In terms of connectivity, all of the new cards come with four DisplayPort 1.3 connectors, as opposed to DisplayPort 1.2a on the old FirePro W-series cards.

Updated: The Radeon Pro WX-series product website lists the new cards as having DisplayPort 1.4, not 1.3. See the comments below for links.

AnandTech has a good article discussing the specifications of all three cards in more detail.

Pricing and availability
The Radeon Pro WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100 are due to ship in Q4 this year.

AMD hasn’t announced pricing, beyond the fact that the entire line-up will come in under $1,000, which puts it on a par with the old FirePro W7100’s MSRP of $800.

Read more about the new Radeon Pro WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100 on AMD’s website