AMD Announces Radeon Pro 5600M Navi GPU with HBM2 - Inside Apple's MacBook Pro 16"
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 15, 2020 11:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- AMD
- Laptops
- Radeon Pro
- Radeon Pro 5600M
Today AMD has officially announced one of the long rumoured missing Navi parts in the form of the new Radeon Pro 5600M mobile GPU, seeing the Navi 12 design finally take shape as a product.
The new high-end mobile GPU is a successor to the Radeon Pro Vega 20 and Vega 16 designs released back in 2018, products that ended up being used in Apple’s MacBook laptops. The new Radeon Pro 5600M also sees its debut in the new 16” MacBook Pro that’s also been debuted today. Apple has traditionally had exclusive rights to these mobile Radeon Pro SKUs so it’s likely this exclusivity also applies to the new Radeon Pro 5600M.
| AMD Radeon Series Mobile Specification Comparison | |||||||
| AMD Radeon Pro 5600M | AMD Radeon RX 5300M | AMD Radeon RX 5500M | AMD Radeon Vega Pro 20 | AMD Radeon RX 560X | |||
| CUs | 40 | 22 | 22 | 20 | 14/16 | ||
| Texture Units | 160 | 88 | 88 | 80 | 64 | ||
| ROPs | ? | 32 | 32 | 32 | 16 | ||
| Game Clock | N/A | 1181MHz | 1448MHz | N/A | N/A | ||
| Boost Clock | 1035MHz | 1445MHz | 1645MHz | 1300MHz | 1275MHz | ||
| Throughput (FP32) | 5.3 TFLOPs | 4.1 TFLOPs | 4.6 TFLOPs | 3.3 TFLOPs | 2.6 TFLOPs | ||
| Memory Clock | 1.54 Gbps HBM2 | 14 Gbps GDDR6 | 14 Gbps GDDR6 | 1.5 Gbps HBM2 | 7 Gbps GDDR5 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 2048-bit | 96-bit | 128-bit | 1024-bit | 128-bit | ||
| Max VRAM | 8GB | 3GB | 4GB | 4GB | 4GB | ||
| Typical Board Power | 50W | ? | 85W | ? | ? | ||
| Architecture | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | Vega (GCN 5) |
GCN 4 | ||
| GPU | Navi 12 | Navi 14 | Navi 14 | Vega 12 | Polaris 11 | ||
| Launch Date | Q2 2020 | Q4 2019 | Q4 2019 | 10/2018 | 04/2018 | ||
The new mobile GPU is characterised by its large compute unit count as well as its usage of HBM2 memory. With a CU count of 40, resulting in 2560 stream processors, the Radeon Pro 5600M actually matches AMD’s current best desktop graphics designs such as the Navi 10-based Radeon 5700XT. A key difference here lies in the clocks, as this mobile variant only clocks up to a maximum of 1035MHz, resulting in a theoretical maximum throughput of 5.3TFLOPs, quite a bit less than its desktop counterpart which lands in at 9.75TFLOPs.
In terms of bandwidth however, the mobile chip more than keeps up with its desktop counterpart. AMD is using a 2048-bit HBM2 memory interface to up to 8GB of memory running at 1.54Gbps, resulting in a bandwidth of 394GB/s, only a bit less than the 448GB/s of the Radeon 5700XT.
The Radeon Pro 5600M is advertised with a total graphics power (TGP) of 50W, identical to the TGP of the Radeon Pro 5500M and the Radeon Pro 5300M. Both of those, in turn, are based on the Navi 14 die, which contains far fewer compute units. This makes the Radeon Pro 5600M an incredibly performant and efficient design – albeit one that's undoubtedly expensive to build.
The new Radeon Pro 5600M is now available inside of Apple’s MacBook Pro 16” as an BTO upgrade option, and comes at a $700 mark-up versus the default Radeon Pro 5500M GPU.
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shelbystripes - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Man... a $700 upcharge?? On top of the Radeon already in the 16” MBP base model?OTOH, that looks like killer performance for a 50W power envelope, and the 8GB HBM2 they’re using isn’t making things cheaper...
RadiclDreamer - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Looks to me like this is more of a productivity based card vs a gaming one and the price point reflects that.mrvco - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
There are far better choices for a 'gaming' laptop than a $3500+ 16" MacBook Pro :-)shelbystripes - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
It’s a Mac, of course it’s a productivity based product, that’s a given.milkywayer - Sunday, June 21, 2020 - link
Anyone knowledgeable knows how good it'll be for gaming if money was no object? Asking for popular games like the new Call of Duty, League of Legends or Tekken 7 etc.I'm happy to see League of Legends plays at 60fps with the i7 model on the 2020 xps 13 but struggled on the i5 model xps 13 (2020).
mrmachine - Thursday, July 2, 2020 - link
This option exists to solve the problem where the 5300m and 5500m consume minimum 18W at idle as soon as you connect an external display to the MBP, because AMD drivers run the memory at full speed by design to avoid glitching with multiple displays.Apple won't admit it's a design fault/limitation with the 5300m and 5500m options, but there are over 2000 posts complaining about it on MacRumors forum.
With the 5600m, memory running at full speed consumes less power and generates less heat, so you not only get better GPU performance (claimed 75%), you have more power and thermal capacity available for CPU performance (+500MHz sustained) and you have less heat and less fan noise at medium workloads.
Plus, it's portable and you have none of the issues you'd get with an eGPU. Having to "disconnect" before unplugging, which forces half your apps to quit or relaunch, and general eGPU bugs.
Spunjji - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Apple have been taking the piss with high-end GPU pricing on the Macbook Pro for years now.Definitely interested to see how this performs in practice. AMD's GPU designs have been crying out for wide-and-slow OEM implementations for years now. I guess this is the perfect place to do that, where the consumers are already primed to absorb the higher cost for a given level of performance.
PeterCollier - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
For $700 extra I would rather rent an Amazon EC2 server instance and run my computations on there rather than locally. I'm an AI scientist and that would be way faster than some thermally constrained GPU in a PoS Apple designed cooling solution.Operandi - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Speaking of intelligence.... maybe.... just maybe AI scientists are not the target market here?And is Apple's thermal solution really that much worse than the competition? I highly doubt it.
willis936 - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Maybe. But who is? 3D modelers? Anyone else?