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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  • deil - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    Apple thermals are usually scrapping the barrel, but it seems it becoming a standard. Everybody loves to fry eggs on a laptop these days. Even if laptops still have some space inside that would fit a heatpipe with 50g copper rad, beeing thinest and red hot is the thing now.
  • brucethemoose - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    I don't think thats the target market. You'd have to be nuts to buy an AMD GPU for training R/N, much less one in a thin, pricey laptop.

    I don't know about iOS-dev stuff though. Can Core ML even run on OSX?
  • not_anton - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    Yes it can - that's the point of Core ML compared to CUDA or OpenCL. It runs equally well on GPUs of any Apple products, up to their smartwatch.
  • Chaitanya - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    AMD seems to have found a very good customer in form of Apple for which they are bringing a lot of custom GPUs.
  • patel21 - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    Apple is still not going to pass on even the half of what its charging customers for the upgrade
  • zepi - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    Apple Gross margin has been traditionally about 40%, so depending on how you look at it, on average they keep about 40% for themselves as a profit and pass on 60% further into the "supply chain" in one form or another.
  • Spunjji - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    At $700 for the "upgrade" (as in, on top of the GPU cost factored into the standard model), even if they only pass 50% of it onto AMD they'd still be laughing all the way to the bank.
  • brucethemoose - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link

    Thats *way* more interesting than the rumored RX 5700M/5600M, which supposedly runs hot, has 36 CUs and is shipping with low end GDDR6.
  • Valantar - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    Yeah, this thing is really interesting. I know it's wishful thinking, but I would love this in a 75W version on a HHHL AIC. Best SFF GPU by quite a bit.
  • Spunjji - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    That would kick substantial amounts of ass.

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