AMD Radeon PRO W7700 is cheaper and faster than RTX 4000 SFF ADA according to AMD AMD PRO W7700 finally released. In accordance with AMD’s prior announcement last month, the company is addressing the gap in their workstation Radeon PRO series by introducing the W7700 model, featuring the Navi 32 GPU. Notably, the card does […]
It has the same physical memory as the consumer cards, it just allows in-band ECC which is a software solution. There is no additional manufacturing cost to including in-band ECC. Nvidia even enables the option on the 4090.
You’re right that you’re paying for the certifications though.
Yeah I thought as much, but you are still paying for it (as well as the extra bit of ram needed to make that work I assume) in that price tag
Extra RAM would be if they used out-of-band ECC, which is where you use extra physical dies and a wider bus to handle the storage and transmission of parity data.
These use in-band ECC, which uses the existing memory chips/bus for parity. You have to toggle it in the driver, and with ECC enabled you don’t get the full memory size nor the full bandwidth (you lose 1/8th of each). As far as I’m aware, no GDDR6 GPUs use out-of-band ECC.
It’s purely a market segmentation thing, there is nothing physically stopping the RX7700 from running the exact same ECC mode as the W7700.
Thanks for clearing that up! My assumption was these cards would have a little extra memory so they could hit the 16GB with ECC turned on.
And yeah, it is just market segmentation but you still have to pay for it unfortunately 🤣🤣