The News: AMD announced the AMD Radeon PRO W7700, which AMD positions as the most powerful professional workstation graphics card under $1,000 (a price/performance sweet spot) for content creation, CAD, and AI applications. The new workstation graphics card is designed to meet the evolving demands of professional workflows, including increasingly complex computer-generated designs, the continual growth in the development of visual effects and animations, a global surge in construction, and the explosive growth in advanced AI applications. The full press release is available on AMD’s website.
AMD Announces New Radeon PRO W7700 Workstation Graphics Card
Analyst Take: With its 16 GB of high-speed VRAM, AMD’s Radeon PRO W7700 workstation graphics card looks custom-made for the growing demands of the design, manufacturing, engineering, construction, and creative industries. For starters, because it is built on AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture, the Radeon PRO W7700 workstation graphics card enables higher resolution models, textures, and effects for 3D artists, CAD designers, and video editors. Second, it enables smoother data exchange between applications, which frees users to multitask and more frictionlessly switch between editing, compositing, and retouching.
Thanks to its built-in hardware-based AI accelerators, the Radeon PRO W7700 workstation graphics card is also capable of accelerating AI workloads in critical applications such as Adobe Premiere, Topaz Labs Video AI, and DaVinci Resolve to allow users to build and run AI applications right from their desktops.
Radeon PRO W7700 features overview:
- 48 compute units and ray accelerators
- 96 AI accelerators
- 28 TFLOPS (peak single precision – FP32)
- 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with ECC
- 256-bit memory bus
- 4X UHBR 13.5 DisplayPort 2.1 (display ports)
AMD’s announcement comes with some performance notes, including up to 52% performance improvements in SOLIDWORKS, up to 24% higher performance in Creo, and up to 37% higher performance in CATIA compared with competitor solutions. The use case focus here is aimed at architects, designers, and engineers, who will now be able to easily create photorealistic renders and even immersive walkthroughs of their designs. (The GPU’s 16 GB of VRAM should allow 3D artists and video editors to work with high-resolution models and textures with on-card memory.) The Radeon PRO W7700 also supports the faster AV1 encode/decode and AI-enhanced video-encode codex capabilities to speed up video encoding times and accelerate video production. The card also supports DisplayPort 2.1, which brings richer color spaces and the highest display resolutions available today to video editors’ workspaces. Combined with AMD’s Radiance Display Engine technologies, projects can be viewed on up to four displays at a time.
Per Dan Wood, corporate vice president, Radeon product management, AMD “built and optimized the AMD Radeon PRO W7700 graphics cards to create premium workstation graphics experiences, enabling our customers to boost innovation and productivity.” To his point, the card’s range is exactly what the market needs right now, satisfying the generative AI needs of designers, engineers, and creators alike, with support for a broad spectrum of 3D tools from SOLIDWORKS and CATIA to Blender. The card is also the result of the ongoing 5-year collaboration between AMD and ACCA, whose Edificius BIM application has been instrumental to its development and highlights some of the early value of AMD’s recent Nod.ai acquisition.
You might also recall that AMD’s third quarter (Q3) client segment revenue was $1.5 billion (up 42% year-over-year [YoY], primarily driven by strong Ryzen mobile processor sales, and sequentially, up 46% with Ryzen 7000 Series CPU sales carrying most of the uplift load.) AMD had also ramped up its H2 2023 momentum with a Ryzen processor lineup expansion (the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processor, which is expected to show up in OEM devices from Dell, HP, and Lenovo).
The new Radeon PRO W7700 looks like AMD’s answer to continued momentum in the client segment’s growth. The release builds on AMD’s existing Radeon PRO W7600 and Radeon PRO W7500 lineup alongside the equally impressive Radeon RX 7900M (the fastest AMD Radeon GPU ever developed for laptops for high-end gaming and content creation use cases). Given the demand uplift I expect to see in the PC space in 2024 thanks to powerful new on-device AI capabilities, AMD’s Radeon PRO W7700 is well-positioned to both enable OEMs to deliver AI-ready hardware to professional and prosumer PC segments and capitalize on the coming AI-driven sea change PC demand, adding to AMD’s recovery momentum.
The Radeon PRO W7700 workstation graphics card is available now, with product availability in OEM workstations and SI systems to quickly follow.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Image Credit: AMD
Author Information
Research Director Olivier Blanchard covers edge semiconductors and intelligent AI-capable devices for Futurum. In addition to having co-authored several books about digital transformation and AI with Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman, Blanchard brings considerable experience demystifying new and emerging technologies, advising clients on how best to future-proof their organizations, and helping maximize the positive impacts of technology disruption while mitigating their potentially negative effects. Follow his extended analysis on X and LinkedIn.
