Apple recently announced a refresh for the new MacBook pro 16 inch, and claims that the new graphics card will provide a 75% performance boost over it’s predecessors, the Radeon Pro 5500M and Radeon Pro 5300M. The new GPU will be an Apple exclusive, and will be coming by default on the MacBook pro 16 inch this year. The Radeon Pro 5600M is a huge upgrade compared to it’s younger siblings.
Specs
It’s based on the 7nm architecture, features 40 compute units, along with a total of 2560 stream processors, just like the Radeon RX 5700XT. But there are a few changes here. The GPU is clocked at a maximum of 1035MHz and gets half the FP32 performance compared to the 5700XT. It’s maximum throughput is just 5.3 TFLOPs compared to the 5700XT’s 9.75TFLOPs. The Radeon Pro 5600M Navi 12 GPU has the highest FP32 performance of the lot. The main thing that makes this stand out is the HBM2 memory. None of the Navi cards have this high bandwidth memory. The HBM2 memory is in a 2048 bit memory bus, which churns out a memory bandwidth of 394GB/s at an effective clock speed of 1540MHz. The RX 5700XT’s memory bandwidth is not that afar off, at 448GB/s
The main reason for the lower clocks is so that they can give a TGP(Total Graphics Power) of 50w just like it’s lower siblings, while having a higher performance output. HBM2 had some great power improvements over GDDR5 and GDDR5X, but GDDR6 is way more power efficient than them both. This shows that Navi is capable of using both HBM2 and GDDR6 memory on their graphics cards. This could be a problem as AMD is preparing their CDNA type GPUs which are compute based graphics cards, designed specifically for servers and data centres.
Coming to price, it sure will be expensive due to the HBM2 memory, and MacBooks aren’t cheap either, especially the Pro variants. Apple is known for overpricing their devices thanks to their brand value. There’s no word on when this GPU will be available for users on Windows PCs, but expect a similar card with GDDR6 to be available by the end of next year for other laptops. Currently, the Radeon Pro 5600M is available as an upgrade option for the MacBook Pro, with a total markup of $700 while the default is a Radeon Pro 5500M.
Are you willing to get the MacBook Pro with the latest Radeon Pro 5600M featuring 8 Gigs of HBM2 memory on it? Do let us know in the comments.
