AMD Unveils the Radeon AI PRO R9700
Artificial Intelligence is crying out for muscle, and AMD is responding. They've just unleashed a new graphics card specifically tailored for the job of AI: the Radeon AI PRO R9700. This is not a rebranded gaming card; it's a proper AI workhorse, with a massive 32GB of VRAM and a significant jump in performance over the previous generation.
A New Brand for a New Era: Radeon AI PRO
The R9700 also comes with a new product branding: Radeon AI PRO. The new line will be a replacement for their former Radeon WX and Radeon PRO product lineup, a clear indication of the move toward the expanding AI space.
The first card in this exciting new series, the Radeon AI PRO R9700, borrows some DNA from the gaming-focused RX 9070 XT but is particularly optimized for AI math. It's built around the solid Navi 48 GPU, which boasts:
- 64 compute units (amounting to 4096 stream processors)
- A healthy 128 AI accelerators
- An up to 300W Total Board Power (TBP)
Memory and Performance: Built for Heavy Lifting
The highlight here is clearly the memory. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 ships with 32GB of GDDR6 memory, spread over a 256-bit bus. That's twice as much VRAM available on the RX 9070 XT, giving huge scope to build large AI models. AMD is also pointing to some huge performance figures: 96 TFLOPs of FP16 compute and an eye-watering 1531 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) of INT4 (Sparse) calculations.
Why so much VRAM. The purpose is simple: efficient high-quality AI model processing. That 32GB sweet spot is ideally suited to numerous advanced local AI workloads, such as:
- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B Q6
- Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct 2503 Q8
- Flux 1 Schnel
- SD 3.5 Medium
AMD claims the Radeon AI PRO R9700 is twice as fast as the previous generation Radeon PRO W7800 32GB GPU in DeepSeek R1 and other similar applications. They're also showing comparisons against NVIDIA's RTX 5080 (16GB VRAM) where the R9700 can be up to 5 times faster with memory-constrained AI models.
Scalability for Even Bigger Tasks
But the potential doesn't stop at one card. Radeon AI PRO R9700 supports 4-way Multi-GPU setups on next-generation PCIe 5.0 platforms. It is easy to configure a system with an enormous 128GB VRAM pool, capable of running extremely large models like Mistral 123B and DeepSeek R1 70B that consume up to 112-116GB of VRAM.
Availability and Design
Those who wish to get their hands on the Radeon AI PRO R9700 won't have long to wait. It'll emerge in July through key partners like:
- ASUS
- ASRock
- Gigabyte
- PowerColor
- Sapphire
- XFX
- Yeston
The card itself will feature a dual-slot form factor with a blower-style cooler, par for professional-grade hardware.
AMD clearly is serious about leadership in the AI space with the Radeon AI PRO R9700, offering a compelling combination of VRAM, performance, and scalability for premium AI workloads.
