AMD’s new $10,000 graphics card has its own built-in SSDs

By Jon Martindale July 26, 2016

amd radeo pro duo ssg capsaicin rprossg — Image used with permission by copyright holder

As much as gamers might be willing to spend on their PCs, their computers have nothing on the cost of high-end workstations, especially if those workstations use one of AMD’s new Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics (SSG). The new $10,000 Radeon Pro Duo from AMD, comes equipped with its own pair of PCIExpress 3.0 M.2 slots for massively expanding its local storage.

Announced this week at the AMD Capsaicin event, which showcased many of the company’s new VR and gaming developments, the new graphics card is aimed at professionals who need more than the 8GB of the standard Radeon Pro Duo, or even more than some of its largest professional graphics processors (GPU).

We’re told that with the right M.2 SSDs, you can add as much as a terabyte of local storage to the Radeon Pro Duo SSG.

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Related: AMD’s new dual-GPU card is here, but it’s not built for gamers

Although the expanded M.2 storage is fast, it’s much slower than on-board memory, especially the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) utilized by the Radeon Pro Duo. However, it should prevent the graphics card from ever having to use system memory, which should reduce any lag that developers and enterprise users encounter, since the GPU doesn’t have to make a call to the CPU to access the expanded memory as it would if using shared system resources.

It goes without saying that this card is complete overkill for anyone doing anything at a consumer level, but for business users who feel that they would find some use for this monster card, you’ll be able to buy one soon, at the nice round price of $10,000. On top of that, as Anandtech explains, AMD is only selling it as a beta product for now.

While we can expect final versions of the product, presumably with bundled storage, sometime in 2017, for now you can spend $10,000 and be sent a developer kit of the graphics card, though it’s not entirely clear what that bundle includes.

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