AMD Releases Radeon Pro WX 8200 Workstation GPU

If you follow AMD’s professional graphics segment, you’ll be well aware of a gap in its product stack, a gap that has existed for quite a while, now. The Polaris-based WX 2100 to the WX 7100 came out quite a while ago, and remained so until the Vega GPUs started to ship. So far, only two Vegas-based Radeon Pros have been released, the WX 9100 and the experimental SSG, both of which as based on Vega 64. So where is the WX 8100?

Well, it turns out that it’s remained hidden away for a while, and in fact, it’s been so long since the initial Vegas launch of the WX 9100, that it gained an extra digit. The Vega 56 based Radeon Pro is now finally out and it’s called the WX 8200 – yes, not 8100 as expected, for reasons we have not been told.

It fills in the gap between the 7100 and 9100, although based on performance between the RX 580 and Vega 56 which the two Radeon Pros are based on, there will be quite a significant delta. The price of $999 is surprising though, but it does have half the memory of the WX 9100. The WX 8200 is also squarely aimed at the P5000 in terms of performance, but comes in a bit cheaper.

Things do get complicated with the WX 8200 when the Vega FE card is the same price (if you can actually get hold of one) and comes with more HBM2 memory. On top of that, the Vega FE has access to the same Radeon Pro driver stack as well. What the WX 8200 does have going for it is the lower power, ISV certifications, and ECC support (which is quite important for a number of businesses).

Still, the card is very late on the release, but at least plugs a hole in AMD’s professional product stack, and is one of the most performant cards you can get in the price range, especially with blender and compute workloads.