AMD has unveiled a new addition to its Radeon PRO W6000 GPU series that caters specifically to the needs of the typical knowledge worker.
The new Radeon PRO W6400 sits below the W6600 and W6800 in the lineup in terms of raw power, but is tuned to deliver optimal performance across the most common professional use cases. It’s described by AMD as the company’s new “king of mainstream graphics workloads”.
The W6400 features 4GB GDDR6 RAM, two DisplayPort connectors and PCIe 4.0 support, and delivers a performance of up to 3.54TFLOPS (per the FP32 benchmark) at a peak power consumption of 50W.
The new graphics card will go on sale at $249, which is slightly more expensive than the previous generation WX 3200, but less costly than comparable Nvidia models. TechRadar Pro is awaiting confirmation of international pricing.
The typical graphics workload
The design of the Radeon PRO W6400 was informed by research conducted by AMD, which sought to establish a picture of the most common business workloads, and therefore the precise graphical needs of the average worker.
During a briefing attended by TechRadar Pro, the company unpacked some of its findings. For example, AMD found that a third of professionals use two monitors, the majority of which still have a 1080p resolution. To save space and cut costs, then, AMD opted for two instead of four display connectors.
Equally, the company saw that the average worker spends most of their time using video conferencing software, productivity tools and web browsers. Although professionals working with more demanding CAD and 3D rendering software will be better served by more performant models, the W6400 offers plenty of performance for regular office workloads.
“It’s not about how much the GPU is being pushed,” said Jamie Gwilliam, Senior Manager at AMD. “The takeaway is that a balanced system is best for typical knowledge workers. Sometimes the GPU is doing the heavy lifting, sometimes it’s the CPU.”
“Although it’s a light workload GPU, you are sacrificing neither hardware nor software functionality. That’s why we think it will be our new king of mainstream workloads.”
Performance advantage
Inevitably, the Radeon PRO W6400 does not deliver the same level of performance as its larger and more expensive W6000 series peers. However, AMD says its newest GPU outperforms comparable models from Nvidia by a comfortable margin.
Built on a 6nm process, the W6400 offers superior peak TF performance than both the Nvidia T1000 (2.5TF) and T600 (1.7TF), both of which are more expensive.
It also either matches or outperforms the T600 across spreadsheet, web browsing and video conferencing workloads, and the performance advantage becomes more stark for image editing and CAD. It’s worth noting, though, that AMD did not provide equivalent comparisons between the W6400 and T1000.
Like the other cards in the W6000 series, the W6400 also benefits from AMD’s trademark Infinity Cache technology, which allows for a doubling of the effective bandwidth in some scenarios (reaching up to 289GB/s), depending on the software in use.
