AMD today announced its latest professional graphics card, the AMD Radeon PRO W6400. The new card slides into the entry tier of the AMD Radeon PRO W6000 series, and will serve as AMD’s answer to rival NVIDIA’s T1000 and T600 entry level graphics cards. The W6400 will be available beginning this quarter.

For a budget graphics card, it was a bit strange that the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 was announced with the tagline A New King’s Arriving. The W6400 is certainly not the king of the W6000 series—at least not in terms of performance. That honor remains with the AMD Radeon PRO W6800. But AMD certainly hopes the W6400 will be the king of its intended market, which the company sorts by three criteria:

1. Mainstream GPU workload tasks requiring PRO features and support.
2. CAD designers, engineers, and office knowledge workers.
3. Budget conscious professionals with form factor requirements.  

It pays to know your workloads, says AMD, cautioning users not to spend more than they need on a graphics card whose extra power would go to waste. The new AMD Radeon PRO W6400 is just the answer for typical office workers, the company claims, or CAD users who don’t dabble too much in GPU rendering. Those who need the graphics boost when they need it, but don’t need it all the time.

“This card is very much aimed at knowledge workers or office based workloads,” explained AMD’s Jamie Gwilliam, Radeon PRO marketing lead. “[The AMD W6400] is going to be the king of mainstream graphics on the AMD W6000 series.”

Tiny But Mighty

The AMD Radeon PRO W6400 is a fraction of the size of its larger siblings, the W6600 and W6800. The small form factor graphics card is not much longer than a pen at 6.6” (168 mm), with the width of a standard iPhone at 2.7” (69mm). The single slot card is designed to fit handily in smaller workstation towers.

At that size, the W6400 has enough room for two DisplayPort outputs, half the port count of the bigger W6600 and a third of the W6800. According to AMD, two outputs is just right for most users—two displays and one display are the most common desktop setups, respectively, per a broad survey of the company’s customer base. It’s for this reason that AMD isn’t too worried that the W6400’s main competitors, the NVIDIA T1000 and T600, both offer four display outputs in the form of Mini DisplayPorts.

“The majority of people, while they like having as many monitors as possible, in reality they’re running dual screen setups. And having no special cables, and having no special dongles that they need to find to make sure the connection works, was critical. It’s a plug and play scenario,” Gwilliam explained.

Specs of the AMD Radeon PRO W6400

The AMD Radeon PRO W6400 is built on AMD’s RDNA 2 microarchitecture, which as AMD is fond of pointing out, is used in the latest generation of game consoles including the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X. RDNA 2 includes hardware accelerated raytracing, the must-have feature of modern graphics cards, as well as the performance and efficiency improvements over RDNA that one would expect in every generational step.

The specs of the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 are as follows:

Note the spec for the L3 cache, which AMD dubs the Infinity Cache. This additional global cache was inspired by AMD’s Zen CPU architecture, and it enables a GPU to exceed its specified peak memory bandwidth. AMD describes the Infinity Cache as a “super-charged bandwidth amplifier.”

For the AMD Radeon PRO W6400, the theoretical peak bandwidth is 128 GB/s, but AMD claims the effective bandwidth is higher. The company has not specified just how much higher, but it has previously asserted that Infinity Cache technology enables a gain of 3.25x for 256-bit, 16 GB/s GPUs.

“Because of our learnings from the CPU part of the AMD business, [AMD Infinity Cache] allows us to really push the benefits of these light workload GPUs and get much more effective bandwidth… and really drive the performance much higher than you would expect with a typical light workload GPU,” Gwilliam elaborated.

Performance of the AMD Radeon PRO W6400

While we haven’t yet gotten our hands on the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 to put it through its paces, AMD has released a few internal test results for the new graphics card. You might expect that it would outshine its predecessor, the AMD Radeon PRO WX 3200, across the board, but it does not. In PCMark 10, the W6400 hits only 0.93x the performance of the WX 3200 for spreadsheets, and it’s nearly identical in performance for web browsing and video conferencing.

Where the new W6400 really improves is in CAD workloads, achieving 1.87x the performance of the previous generation in Rhino and 4.09x in AutoCAD. Rendering and photo editing are also improvements for the W6400, achieving 1.38x and 1.31x the score of the WX 3200, respectively, in PCMark.

And what about its competition? AMD has compared the W6400 to the NVIDIA T600 with favorable results in nearly every category (web browsing appears to be the only loss for the W6400, but by only a few percentage points). The W6400 boasts 1.23x the performance of the T600 in video conferencing, 1.24x in Rhino, 1.16x in AutoCAD, 1.63x in photo editing, and 1.42x in rendering. It remains to be seen if independent benchmark testing can validate these results.

AMD did not publish any benchmark comparisons to the more powerful NVIDIA T1000, though it does point out the price difference ($499 for the NVIDIA T1000 and $229 for the W6400) as well as the theoretical peak FP32 performance of each (2.5 TFLOPS for the T1000 and 3.54 TFLOPS for the W6400).

The AMD Radeon PRO W6500M and W6300M

Alongside the new Radeon PRO W6400 desktop graphics card, AMD has also fleshed out its mobile GPU portfolio with the addition of two new mobile processors: the AMD Radeon PRO W6500M and the AMD Radeon PRO W6300M. These join the existing AMD Radeon PRO W6600M, and together the three mobile cards mirror the heavy, medium, and light offerings of the desktop W6000 series.

“This is a really strong medium mobile processor for those more demanding GPU graphic intensive tasks,” said Gwilliam of the new W6500M. “Moving down to the light workload GPU, the W6300M, you can see this is a little bit reduced in performance, as you would expect. But because of that it also allows a very light peak power consumption.”

Here are the specs of the new mobile GPUs: