AMD’s $1,500 Radeon Pro Duo GPU is for VR content creators rather than consumers

[Wireless News]

http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/X2mfKp2sT8IMz3iU8jT9DQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztmaT1maWxsO2g9ODY7cT03NTt3PT EzMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/digital_trends_973/2bf9e7d82f9387557e8ac1d67fd7652a (http://news.yahoo.com/amd-1-500-radeon-pro-003620623.html)At last night’s AMD presser, the company revealed that with its latest round of Fiji-based GPUs, it’s now aiming to focus not only on VR content consumers but on its-creators as well.-Apparently, this starts with the massive Radeon Duo Pro, which was expected to launch by the end of last year,-though the company delayed it to release around the same time as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Essentially, AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo is the GPU equivalent of two children on each other’s shoulders wearing a trench coat, except instead of children, they’re two Radeon R9 Fury X GPUs housed in a larger enclosure. Individually, each GPU boasts 4,096 stream processor, 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs, along with 4GB of HBM (each) on a 4,096-bit bus. Related: AMD’s GDC 2016 press conference could convince the most diehard VR skeptics Performance-wise, we’re looking at 16 TFLOPS, and though AMD hasn’t revealed clockspeeds yet, Maximum PC claims you can count on about 1GHz. On the downside of having such a powerful card, however, is the Radeon Pro Duo demands an excessive 8-pin PCI-E power connector, drawing around 450W of energy in addition to the 75W you can get from the PCI-E slot. In terms of physical build, the Radeon Duo Pro takes advantage of a closed loop liquid cooling system featuring a 120mm radiator. On this, the company states that “there is more than sufficient cooling for maximum performance all while staying quiet.” The Radeon Pro Duo will be the first product in AMD’s VR Ready Creator lineup. By marrying it with its LiquidVR SDK solution, AMD appears to be devising a sort of ecosystem to keep creators tied to both its hardware and its software in their VR game/app development pursuits. AMD’s Radeon Pro Duo GPU will retail for $1,500 when it comes out in the second quarter of this year.



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