A ghost from the past appeared reddit thread (opens in new tab) The other day. Users could get their hands on a Radeon Pro prototype that utilizes the entire Vega 20 die.
AMD has produced many graphics cards and accelerators based on the Vega 20 silicon. However, only the more exclusive and niche models featured fully-capable Vega 20 dies housing 64 CUs, equivalent to 4,096 shading units. A small list includes the 2018 Radeon Instinct MI60, which targets the AI and deep learning market, as well as the Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo featured on select Mac Pro machines. Sadly, the retail market has come to reap the full benefits of what the Vega 20 had to offer.
The mysterious Radeon Pro from the Reddit thread has the same aesthetics as the Radeon Pro V420. This was a professional graphics card that also never hit the market. A photo of the PCB shows a large 331 mm² Vega 20 silicon with 4 stacks of fast HBM2 memory. Additionally, the prototype features one 8-pin PCIe power connector and one 6-pin PCIe power connector suitable for up to 300W.
GPU-Z is an unannounced piece of hardware, so I had some trouble identifying Radeon Pro graphics cards. However, according to the software, it has the same device ID as the Radeon Instinct MI60. Additionally, the utility reports SK hynix as the manufacturer of his HBM2 memory, but it’s actually Samsung.
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According to the owner, the Radeon Pro graphics card comes with two different sets of firmware. The primary firmware has a higher power limit with 32GB of 1,600 Mbps memory, while the second firmware has a more conservative power limit with a memory quota of 31.984GB. Additionally, the graphics card has a typical blower-style cooler, looks great, and has a bit of RGB lighting. Redditor reported temperatures below 80 degrees Celsius
Under load, the cooling fan speed reaches 3,800 RPM. For reference, the maximum rotation speed of the cooling fan is 5,000 RPM.
The Radeon Pro prototype hits 1,700 MHz, so it’s well within range of other Vega 20 powered SKUs. The Radeon Pro Vega II tops out at 1,720 MHz, and only the Radeon Instinct MI60 boasts his 1,800 MHz boost clock speed.
This is a prototype and requires proper software level support, so performance may improve. As a result, Radeon Pro graphics cards do not perform at 100% in real-world testing. Nevertheless, it delivered up to 6.4 TFLOPs of double-precision performance, roughly 14% slower than the Radeon Instinct MI60.
Why AMD didn’t backtrack and launch the Radeon Pro V420 remains a mystery. It was a very competitive professional graphics card at the time.
