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 2540 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 based on the Navi 14 die which contains much less compute units. This makes the 5600M an incredibly performant and efficient design.
The new Radeon Pro 5600 is now available inside of Apple’s MacBook Pro 16” as an option, and comes at a $700 mark-up versus the default Radeon Pro 5500M GPU.