AMD Releases $399 Radeon Pro W5500 Workstation Graphics Card

Following-up on its first Navi-based Radeon Pro release from November, of the W5700, AMD has just pulled the veil off of the second entrant: the $399 Radeon Pro W5500. Where’s the W5600? Well, considering the RX 5600 XT for gaming just released weeks ago, we can expect it to translate itself for the workstation market in the near future. For context, the RX 5500 XT released in December.

Priced at $399, this Radeon Pro W5500 in effect replaces the older Polaris-based WX 5100, which should mean that this price-point is getting a big shot in the arm. Like the RX 5500 XT, the W5500 sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory, peaking at 224GB/s bandwidth.

In addition to the desktop-bound W5500, AMD is also releasing the W5500M, which is the mobile variant of the GPU. Previously, AMD provided a 5500M to Apple for use in its MacBook Pros, and it’d be easy to assume that both are the same. Instead, the 5500M has 24 compute units, for a total of 1536 cores – a 9% boost. Still, both GPUs are similar, but it’s interesting that there is a disparity here.

The introduction of the W5500 is brought alongside the latest Radeon Pro Enterprise driver, 20.Q1. With the W5500, AMD has its sights on the Quadro P2200 (5GB), which is a lesser-known NVIDIA workstation card, a minor bump over the original P2000. AMD says that when these two cards are compared, the W5500 delivers not just super-strong performance, but better performance-per-watt in certain workloads (SolidWorks is explicitly mentioned).

In addition to the release of the latest GPU driver, AMD also says that its ISV certification list has reached 1,400, representing 243 different professional applications. R&D and certification like this is one of the reasons workstation GPUs carry a price premium. AMD says that the W5500 will become available this month, so if you are interested in going the Navi route for a more affordable price, keep your eyes peeled.