Apple has just added an additional GPU option to go with its MacBook Pro lineup. And it seems to be a substantial upgrade too claiming up to 75% increase in performance over the RX 5500M. We are of course talking about the RX 5600M with 8GB of High bandwidth memory (HBM2).
This will obviously not come cheap in accordance with Apples pricing practices. This upgrade will set you back $700 over the variant with an RX 5500M 4GB. The RX 5600M is a mobility GPU by AMD running on the 7nm RDNA architecture. This helps it achieve greater efficiency and higher performance per clock over the older Vega architecture.
The Radeon Pro 5600M has 40 Compute units (CUs) which can deliver up to 5.3 Teraflops (TFLOPS) of single-precision (FP32) floating-point performance. It is coupled with 8GB of HBM2 memory offering a blazing fast 394 GB/s bandwidth for data-intensive applications.
As previously noted the RX 5600M provides a 75% increase in performance over the RX 5500M. This makes sense as it he 5600M (40 CUs) has around 67% more CUs than the 5500M (24CUs). The HBM memory will definitely shine in the bandwidth-hungry applications.
This also means that the cheapest that you could grab a MacBook Pro 16 inch with an RX 5600M for would be $3200. But if you are a professional and your workflow can benefit from the upgrade then it might be worth it.
On a side note, there’s another upgrade for Mac users in the form of an SSD upgrade kit for the Mac Pro. This will allow those who already own a Mac Pro to upgrade to either 1TB, 2TB, 4TB or 8TB SSD. The Mac Pros had to resort to third-party solutions previously to upgrade storage.
Apple hasn’t revealed any pricing information but we can be sure that it would be expensive. So check back later as we will update it as soon as we get the pricing information.