256
GPU Compute / Accelerators / Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?
« on: June 05, 2020, 01:05:50 pm »The RX 5700 came out last year and it was followed 6 months later by the Pro version, specifically the Radeon Pro W5700.
The W5700 is basically double the price of the RX 5700. From the perspective of a POWER user, is this worthwhile?
Summarizing some of the key differences in the Pro version:
- AMD is testing the hardware and drivers more thoroughly: but do they test on any POWER9 systems?
- AMD is releasing driver updates for the Pro cards on a regular schedule: do these bug fixes appear in the amdgpu release for Linux users just as quickly?
- the marketing material describes various features, such as the AMD Remote Workstation (use your GPU remotely from a laptop) but is that relevant for a Linux user? The software they offer is proprietary, so there are a large percentage of people in this space who would not use it anyway and we also have free software alternatives
- the last significant benefit I could see: the overall design is less aggressive, slightly less power consumption and lower clockrates than other cards so even ignoring the questions about drivers, maybe it will last longer and be more stable
- some people justified the purchase of Radeon Pro products when they included ECC RAM but in the W5700, it is not ECC, it is the same as the RX 5700
I've got an open mind about this: for example, an OEM built RX 5700 that has liquid cooling and isn't overclocked may be more relevant to some people than the W5700. But if AMD is regularly testing amdgpu with W5700 on POWER9 then that alone would make me feel they are investing in this architecture.