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Apple has appear a new refresh for the MacBook Pro 16-inch, with claims that the new GPU option will provide up to a 75 percent performance improvement for end-users. Rumors suggest the GPU may be exclusive to Apple tree's product lines, but the 5600M looks similar a sizeable upgrade compared with anything AMD has shipped before.

With a $700 upgrade price, you'll exist paying through the nose for this GPU — starting toll on the MacBook Pro 16-inch with a 5600M is going to be ~$3,200 for the base configuration.

One of the characteristics of low-power GPUs is that they tend to be broad and dull. Power consumption in GPUs and CPUs isn't linear with respect to clock speed once voltage increases are required to reach higher frequencies. With the 5600M, AMD has doubled down on this strategy. With 40 CUs, the 5600M matches the full-fat Radeon 5700XT in core count, but it runs at a fraction of the clock speed — 1035MHz boost clock, compared with 1905MHz for the 5700XT. Memory bandwidth, even so, is most the aforementioned: 394GB/s for the 5600M, compared with 448GB/s for the 5700 XT. The flake uses a 2-stack HBM2 solution for retention bandwidth, with ii 1024-fleck links in total.

Apple claims the GPU can offer up to a 75 percent performance improvement over previous cards, and looking at the specs, we can believe information technology — at least in some workloads. Navi was roughly ane.3x more than efficient per clock than GCN, so shifting away from Vega / Polaris wins that as a major indicate immediately. Memory bandwidth has nearly doubled in several cases, and then whatever GPU bandwidth-sensitive workloads are going to see a kicking. The expansion to 8GB will allow the GPU to run workloads the 4GB 5500M couldn't have touched.

We don't know how effectively Apple'southward earlier GPUs hold their clocks, so it's impossible to calculate how much of an advantage the 5600M delivers. If Apple'south Radeon 5300M and 5500M GPUs in the 16-inch MacBook Pro spend virtually of their fourth dimension near top-clock, the gains will be smaller. If they tended to pull down into the 1.two – 1.3GHz range, the sheer width of the 5600M will requite it a substantial performance heave.

Be aware, nevertheless, that the actual performance figures provided are below that 75 percent figure. The gains in Apple'due south chosen benchmarks appear to mostly be in the 1.2x – one.4x range, with both Fortnite and Total War: Three Kingdoms picking up ~1.3x.

Image and data by Apple

Most impressive of all is the power consumption. AMD claims it tin deliver this card — with 8GB of VRAM, 40 CUs, 160 texture units, and (presumably) 64 ROPs in merely 50W of power — identical to the weaker, less-equipped 5300M and 5500M before it.

There are a few implications to AMD'due south decision to build a Navi-form GPU this mode. First, it ways HBM2 is nevertheless delivering ability improvements over GDDR6, at least in a higher place certain capacities. We knew that HBM2 had advantages over GDDR5 and GDDR5X, just GDDR6 is more power-efficient than either.

This, in turn, means that Navi is capable of using both types of RAM. This could have ramifications for AMD's future CDNA GPUs (Compute Navi), or even some of its top-tier graphics cards. The assumption has been that AMD would equip Big Navi / RDNA2 with GDDR6, and I recollect that'due south still the probable outcome, but this is the kickoff time we've seen an RDNA GPU combined with HBM instead of GDDR6, and it means AMD is keeping its hand in that game.

Equally for the toll and likely performance of the 5600M, here's the way I encounter information technology: Y'all don't purchase a MacBook Pro considering you want a low-price laptop with the highest possible performance-per-dollar. You don't buy a high-end GPU from Apple if you care about pricing on the PC side at all, considering Apple has always charged exorbitant upgrade prices.

The 5600M is going to be the highest-performing GPU option in a MacBook Pro, and that's going to motion at least some laptops from people who want performance in that form cistron and with macOS instead of Windows. AMD says the new GPU option is for video editing, color grading, application development, and game cosmos. Nosotros probably won't see this specific office come to Windows PCs, simply nosotros'd like to know what AMD's plans for HBM2 and Navi await similar in the futurity.

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