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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Spunjji - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
And how! 8 Zen 2 cores and a competent iGPU for when you're on battery power would have made this setup literally unbeatable in the Windows world.brucethemoose - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Yeah, that seems like a glaring omission...Spunjji - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
Sadly I don't think AMD can produce the volume Apple demand, and either way, Apple certainly aren't liable to switch CPU designer mid-refresh.Demiurge - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
Based on what?SaturnusDK - Sunday, June 21, 2020 - link
If AMD can meet demands from both Sony and Microsoft for their upcoming console launches, they can certainly keep up with the comparably laughable demands from Apple.Smell This - Thursday, June 18, 2020 - link
I'm not the guy for this but my understanding is AMD GPU compute under Final Cut Pro / OpenCL / OSX is quite stout.
Sony Vegas on the Win side, too -- I just got a $60 upgrade key for Studio Platinum 17 (from version 9!) for some H.265 HEVC / 4K XAVC editing and 'coding fun. They used to be good about moving keys around, too, as long as you do not abuse the privilege (we'll see how it goes with 'Magix').
jim bone - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
The table shows the memory clock in units Gbps; clock frequencies are measured in Hertz.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
The GPU manufacturers have requested that we report it in Gbps/pin, since double (and quad) pumping makes a mess of traditional Hz metrics.jim bone - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.May I suggest using the "data rate per pin" as the table label in the future? Or some other clarifying name? I would have eventually figured out it was a half/quarter rate clock even if unstated, but the Hz vs Gbps with the current labeling just stands out as a technical error.
Quantumz0d - Monday, June 15, 2020 - link
$3600 in US, what a fucking rip off, just a simple 8 Core processor from 9th gen with this GPU and 16GB DDR4 is that price. Anyone with a little commonsense will go and buy a much better laptop for that price, esp the fact that Area 51M R2 is one option and Clevo X170 series both have a Z490 motherboard, the Alienware is crippled with their crappy AWCC software and Dell price markup over freedom but the X170 is a beast. Although both have a full 2080 SUPER option plus removable SSDs and RAM.Horrible Soldered POS product for POS cooling at insane price.