AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 vs NVIDIA Tesla K40m Comparison

The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 and the NVIDIA Tesla K40m occupy very different positions in the database, despite sitting only four percentile points apart in the overall rankings. That headline number, 69 versus 65 percentile versus all GPUs, is misleading without context: the recorded benchmark coverage is heavily asymmetric, with the AMD card carrying results across multiple suites while the Tesla K40m holds a single Geekbench OpenCL entry. The one direct head-to-head measurement available is decisive, and the specification gap between the two is enormous. This analysis walks through what the data actually shows, where each card's strengths lie, and who should pick which based strictly on the recorded numbers.

Where Each One Wins

The honest answer to "where does each one win" is asymmetric. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 wins the only benchmark where both cards have recorded results: Geekbench OpenCL, with a score of 118202 against 19885 for the Tesla K40m. That is not a close contest. It is a margin of roughly 494 percent in the AMD card's favor, one of the largest gaps the database records between two cards in the same percentile band. The comparison table credits the R9700 with one win and the Tesla K40m with zero.

The Tesla K40m's defense rests entirely on its own score set, and it is thin by modern standards. Its sole recorded result, 19885 in Geekbench OpenCL, places it near several cards in its rival cluster: the AMD FirePro W7000 sits at 19905, less than a tenth of a percent ahead, the Radeon RX 6650 XT at 19765, the FirePro D300 at 19637, and the NVIDIA Quadro K5200 at 19602. Within that neighborhood the K40m is competitive, slightly ahead of the latter three. Against the R9700, however, it has no recorded benchmark where it comes out on top, and the raw specification data suggests none is likely to exist.

Where the K40m still deserves acknowledgment is in its design intent. It is a compute accelerator, not a graphics card: it has no display outputs at all, which tells you its role was headless datacenter and workstation computation rather than driving a monitor. The R9700, by contrast, carries one HDMI 2.1b port and three DisplayPort 2.1a outputs and supports the full DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) feature level, so it handles professional visualization, ray-traced rendering, and modern API workloads that the Kepler-era card simply was never built for. The K40m tops out at DirectX 12 with an 11_1 feature level, meaning it complies with the API but lacks the hardware features the Ultimate tier requires, including the 64 ray-tracing cores present on the Navi 48 chip.

Architecture Differences

The architectural distance between these two parts spans more than a decade of silicon development. The Tesla K40m uses the GK110B chip on the Kepler architecture, fabricated by TSMC on a 28 nm process, with 7,080 million transistors packed into a 561 mm² die. That works out to a transistor density of 12.6 million per square millimeter. The R9700 uses the Navi 48 chip on RDNA 4.0, built by the same foundry on a 4 nm process, cramming 53,900 million transistors into a much smaller 357 mm² die. The density figure lands at 151.0 million transistors per square millimeter, roughly twelve times the K40m's, which is the single clearest illustration of the generational gap in the entire dataset.

The compute resource counts tell the same story. The R9700 has 4096 shading units, 256 texture mapping units, and 128 render output units, plus 64 dedicated ray-tracing cores. The K40m offers 2880 shading units, 240 TMUs, and 48 ROPs, with no ray-tracing cores and no tensor cores listed for either card. Neither part records dedicated tensor hardware in the database, though the R9700's FP16 rate equals its FP32 rate at 47.84 TFLOPS, a 1:1 ratio that benefits mixed-precision workloads. The K40m has no recorded FP16 figure at all. Its FP32 output is 5.046 TFLOPS, meaning the R9700 delivers nearly nine and a half times the raw single-precision throughput.

Clock behavior differs sharply. The Kepler card runs a 745 MHz base and an 876 MHz boost clock, with memory at 1502 MHz for 6 Gbps effective. The RDNA 4.0 part runs a 1660 MHz base, a 2920 MHz boost, and a 2350 MHz game clock, with memory at 2518 MHz for 20.1 Gbps effective. The R9700 also sustains far higher throughput per second of rasterization and texturing: 373.8 GPixel/s and 747.5 GTexel/s against 52.56 GPixel/s and 210.2 GTexel/s for the K40m.

Memory subsystems diverge in philosophy. The K40m uses 12 GB of GDDR5 on a wide 384-bit bus for 288.4 GB/s of bandwidth. The R9700 uses 32 GB of GDDR6 on a narrower 256-bit bus but achieves 644.6 GB/s, more than double the bandwidth with nearly three times the capacity. Platform connectivity favors the AMD card as well: PCIe 5.0 x16 versus PCIe 3.0 x16. Both are dual-slot cards of the same 267 mm length. Power draw is higher on the R9700 at 300 W versus 245 W, fed through a single 16-pin connector, with a 700 W suggested PSU against 550 W for the K40m.

Software API support has also moved on: the R9700 reports Vulkan 1.4 and DirectX 12 Ultimate, while the K40m records Vulkan 1.2.175 and DirectX 12 (11_1). OpenGL is listed at 4.6 for both.

The Verdict

For every use case the database can measure, the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is the pick. It wins the only shared benchmark by a factor of nearly six, it offers vastly higher compute throughput, double the memory bandwidth, and a much larger memory pool for modern workloads. Its percentile standing of 69 versus all GPUs edges out the K40m's 65, and its average benchmark score of 23315 across ten recorded results exceeds the K40m's 19885 from a single test. Its rival cluster is also telling: the R9700 sits within a fraction of a percent of the Radeon R9 M290X (23276), Radeon RX 6600M (23273), Radeon Pro Vega 16 (23250), and NVIDIA P106-100 (23249), all within roughly 0.3 percent.

The Tesla K40m's case is historical and architectural, not performance-based. It is an end-of-life datacenter accelerator, the successor to Tesla Fermi and predecessor to Tesla Maxwell, launched at 7,699 USD as its recorded launch MSRP. The R9700, an active product released in 2025 with a launch MSRP of 1,299 USD, succeeds the Radeon Pro Vega line. Anyone maintaining legacy Kepler-era compute infrastructure might still encounter the K40m, but the data gives no scenario where it outperforms the newer card.

FAQ

Q: Which card is faster in the benchmarks both have recorded?

A: The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700. In Geekbench OpenCL it scored 118202 against 19885 for the Tesla K40m, a margin of about 494 percent.

Q: How much more memory does the R9700 have?

A: The R9700 carries 32 GB of GDDR6, while the K40m has 12 GB of GDDR5. Bandwidth is 644.6 GB/s versus 288.4 GB/s.

Q: Do either of these cards have tensor cores?

A: No. Neither part lists tensor cores in the database. The R9700 does provide FP16 performance equal to its FP32 rate of 47.84 TFLOPS.

Q: Can the Tesla K40m drive a display?

A: No. It has no display outputs at all. The R9700 has one HDMI 2.1b and three DisplayPort 2.1a outputs.

Q: Are both cards still in production?

A: No. The R9700 is listed as active. The Tesla K40m is end-of-life, sitting between Tesla Fermi and Tesla Maxwell in NVIDIA's lineage.

Q: How do their raw compute figures compare?

A: The R9700 delivers 47.84 TFLOPS FP32 against 5.046 TFLOPS for the K40m, nearly nine and a half times the throughput.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

Only one test appears in both cards' result sets, but it is comprehensive in its implications. Geekbench OpenCL is the standard cross-platform compute benchmark, and the recorded scores are 118202 for the R9700 and 19885 for the K40m. The delta of 494.4 percent means the AMD card completed the OpenCL workload roughly six times over in the time the Kepler card needed for one pass.

The supporting results flesh out the picture for the R9700. Its 3DMark Steel Nomad DirectX 12 score of 7006 and Geekbench Vulkan score of 63550 show strong performance in modern graphics APIs. Passmark G3D comes in at 26979, with GPU compute at 15300, DirectX 9 at 363, DirectX 10 at 155, DirectX 11 at 272, and DirectX 12 at 83, plus a G2D score of 1236. The K40m has no entries in any of these suites, which is itself informative: a headless compute card from 2013 was rarely run through consumer graphics testing, and the database reflects that.

Context from each card's rival cluster confirms the scale of the gap. The K40m's 19885 average sits within about one percent of the Quadro K5200 (19602), FirePro D300 (19637), and RX 6650 XT (19765). The R9700's 23315 average outpaces all of them by a wide margin, and its Geekbench OpenCL result alone, 118202, is nearly six times anything in the K40m's neighborhood.

Specification Differences

The two cards differ on nearly every recorded field, so the meaningful contrasts are worth listing directly.

• Process and density: 4 nm versus 28 nm, both TSMC. 53,900 million transistors on a 357 mm² die (151.0M per mm²) versus 7,080 million on 561 mm² (12.6M per mm²).
• Compute resources: 4096 shading units, 256 TMUs, 128 ROPs, and 64 RT cores versus 2880 shading units, 240 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and no RT cores.
• FP32 throughput: 47.84 TFLOPS versus 5.046 TFLOPS. The R9700 also records FP16 at 47.84 TFLOPS; the K40m lists none.
• Clocks: 1660 MHz base, 2920 MHz boost, 2350 MHz game versus 745 MHz base, 876 MHz boost, no game clock recorded. Memory runs at 2518 MHz (20.1 Gbps effective) versus 1502 MHz (6 Gbps effective).
• Memory: 32 GB GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus at 644.6 GB/s versus 12 GB GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus at 288.4 GB/s.
• Interface and outputs: PCIe 5.0 x16 with HDMI 2.1b plus three DisplayPort 2.1a versus PCIe 3.0 x16 with no outputs.
• API support: DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), Vulkan 1.4 versus DirectX 12 (11_1), Vulkan 1.2.175. Both report OpenGL 4.6.
• Power and physical: 300 W TDP with a 16-pin connector and 700 W suggested PSU versus 245 W TDP and a 550 W suggested PSU. Both are dual-slot, 267 mm long.
• Status and lineage: The R9700 is active, released in 2025, successor to Radeon Pro Vega. The K40m is end-of-life, released in 2013, between Tesla Fermi and Tesla Maxwell.
• Launch MSRP: 1,299 USD for the R9700 versus 7,699 USD for the K40m.

In sum, the database shows two cards that share a percentile band and little else. The R9700 wins every measurable comparison; the K40m remains a recorded artifact of an earlier compute era.