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While the bulk of AMD’s Computex presentation was on CPUs and their Instinct lineup of dedicated AI accelerators, the company also has a small product refresh for the professional graphics and workstation AI crowd. AMD is releasing a dual-slot version of their high-end Radeon Pro W7900 card – aptly named the W7900 Dual Slot – with the intent being to improve compute density in workstations by making it possible to install 4 of the cards inside a single chassis.
The release of a dual-slot version of the card comes after the original Radeon Pro W7900 was the first time AMD went with a larger, triple-slot form factor for their flagship workstation card. With the W7000 generation bringing an all-around increase in power consumption, pushing the W7900 to 295 Watts, AMD originally opted to release a larger card for improved acoustics. However this came at the cost of compute density, as most systems could only fit 2 of the thicker cards. As a result, AMD is opting to release a dual-slot version of the hardware as well, to offer a more competitive product for high-density workstation systems – particularly those doing local AI inference.
Other than the narrower cooler, the Radeon Pro W7900DS is for all intents and purposes identical to the original W7900, with the same Navi 31 GPU being driven to the same clockspeeds, and the overall board being run to the same 295 Total Board Power (TBP) limit. This is paired with the same 18Gbps GDDR6 as before, giving the card 48GB of VRAM.
