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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voodoobunny - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
5.3 TFLOPS in 50W ... *oof*, that's nice. Theoretically, that means 7.5 TFLOPS inside the PCIe slot power envelope.Spunjji - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Unfortunately it almost certainly requires the HBM2 to pull off that TDP, so they'd have the same problem Vega did - either clock it reasonably and have it be expensive for the product class, or try to make the performance match the price and blow the TDP six ways to hell.They could maybe hit 6 - 6.5 TFLOPS at the 75W limit with GDDR6, though, which would still be a nice little card for SFF systems.
Apple might just be the only OEM who have the stones to integrate a product like this and charge accordingly.
AlexDaum - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
There could be a market for expensive premium GPUs with low power consumption and still high speed, but I think most people would rather by the cheaper and hotter GPU, since power is rarely a limiting factor in Desktop PCsSaturnusDK - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
15% more performance (in TFLOPS) than a 2060 Max-Q (5.3 vs. 4.55) using 60% less power (50W vs. 80W TDP). Gotta say that's mighty impressive.senttoschool - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Is it really though? The 5600M Pro is using expensive HBM and it's 7nm.SaturnusDK - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Not sure what your point is? It doesn't really matter how the efficiency is achieved. If you have a laptop form factor that demands a certain maximum power usage with the highest possible performance and price of no concern then you use whatever technology you have access to.web2dot0 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Haters are gonna hate. Now you hate Apple for being too power efficient 🤣eastcoast_pete - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
Could be of interest for video editing on the go/in the field, except that AMD cards often don't give the best results with some of the key video editing suites like Adobe Premiere or Black Magic's Da Vinci. I guess it works well with Apple's own software, and that AMD will make sure their MacOS drivers are cooperative.not_anton - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Macbook with this card and 8TB of storage will be the best machine ever for editing raw video at location. HBM2 gives crazy bandwidth, and video processing needs less GPU computation than video games or deep learning.SaturnusDK - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
It's just a shame it's paired with an Intel CPU or it would have been a home run.