What GPU shortage? AMD and Apple's gorgeous new graphics card comes with two | PC Gamer - futrelltwithe

What GPU shortage? AMD and Apple's beautiful new graphics card comes with two

AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card on gradient background

(Image course credit: AMD, Orchard apple tree)

One look at the Radeon In favour of W6800X Duo and you power be curious, what happened to the chip shortage? Well, it's still current, just information technology seems AMD preserved high a stash specifically for this threefold-GPU RDNA 2 power station in front you nowadays. Built for Apple's Mac Pro, the Radeon In favor of W6800X Duo comes with two discrete RDNA 2 GPUs tangled together with AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect.

Is this the most stunning PCB in Personal computer ironware today? For me, it's a toss-up between this and the Intel Underworl Canyon NUC PCB, which is a mini PC marvel if ever so there was one. That also featured AMD Radeon artwork, oddly enough, only falls any distance shortened of the performance on offer from the Radeon Pro W6800X Duo.

Intel Hades Canyon NUC motherboard next to a keyboard — Intel's gorgeous Hades Canyon NUC motherboard. Click to expand. (Image credit: Intel)

Each discrete GPU within the Radeon Pro W6800X Duo shares its specification with the Radeon RX 6800, and then you bum essentially replicate and paste the high-death gaming chip to make astir matchless Radeon Pro W6800X Twain.

One graphics card, two GPUs. Each united featuring 60 RDNA 2 CUs for a total of 3,840 cores per nick. That's 7,680 in total, which for a bit perspective is 50% more cores than the Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Where the Radeon In favor card differs from Radeon gaming cards is memory capacity, which is standardised procedure for a workstation card such as this. There's 32GB of GDDR6 memory per GPU on the W6800X Twain, for a whole of 64GB.

All mounted connected a unity PCB. That means components such American Samoa VRM, MOSFETs, capacitors, and all the traces within the PCB must also be doubled.

AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card annotated — (Paradigm recognition: AMD, Orchard apple tree)

All of which sounds exceptionally hot and thirsty, and you'd probably non be wrong. That's why the W6800X Duo is fitted within Apple's MPX Module, which is a specially-built whole that slots inside the Mackintosh Pro and incorporates up to 500W of major power and Thunderbolt 3. Its height is predominantly made up of a heatsink, which takes vantage of the Macintosh Affirmative's triple-fan design to keep both chips caller.

Then you vex the truly wild bit: Apple will sell you a Mac Pro with deuce MPX Modules inside it. That's four GPUs inside a single machine.

'Wherefore?', I hear you necessitate. The benefit of so much a setup is not only underdone compute power, but likewise more bandwidth to match. Each W6800X Duo includes an Infinity Fabric connection that straddles its two GPUs—one and the same with the interconnect wont to bridge chiplets within AMD Ryzen Zen 2 and newer processors. It's the bandwidth along offer with that connection that offers screechy performance between the two GPUs and will redeem time when running figure-heavy tasks.

Sadly, the years of dual-GPU gambling graphics cards give passed. Where at one time drivers were built to satisfy the inevitably of users spurting either dual-graphics wag or dual-GPU systems, that's not often the case now. In short, this Radeon Pro Duo isn't going to suddenly relieve oneself the Mac Pro a gambling monster. It might represent a monster for devising games, at the least.

Yet that's not to say we North Korean won't see something suchlike in our gaming PCs. AMD is rumoured to comprise producing a nontextual matter card with chiplets, one that might just blur the lines of what constitutes a unique GPU.

If those rumours are true, lease's hope AMD is a little more generous when IT comes to pricing than Orchard apple tree. A Mac Pro with cardinal Radeon Affirmative W6800X Duo MPX Modules starts out at $15,599—each W6800X Duo racking awake $5,000.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his personal tech blog from his hometown in Cambri in 2017. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things at PCGamesN, where helium would later win command of the kit cupboard as hardware editor. Nowadays, as senior hardware editor program at PC Gamer, he spends his days coverage on the latest developments in the technology and gaming diligence. When he's not writing about GPUs and CPUs, you'll find him trying to get as far away from the modern world Eastern Samoa possible away wild bivouacking.