AMD Announces Radeon Pro 5000 GPUs, but They're Only for Macs

Alongside the release of the new Intel-powered iMac, AMD are announcing the new Radeon Pro 5000 series GPUs, which look great on paper, but will only be available in Macs. The new GPUs in this announcement are the Radeon Pro 5700 XT, Pro 5700, Pro 5500 XT, and the Pro 5300. These GPUs are not to be mixed up with the Pro W5000 series.

You'll notice from the spec sheet that the Pro 5700 XT has twice the GDDR6 memory as the RX 5700 XT sold to consumers, which is because 3D CAD designers, editors and certain other graphics work requires bigger frame buffers. The Pro 5700 and Pro 5500 XT don't have these kinds of gains over their RX counterparts. A new name on the block is the Pro 5300, which comes with 20 compute units for a total SP count of 1280, and it comes with just a 2 GB framebuffer. It's unclear whether this means we'll also be seeing an RX 5300 graphics card anytime soon, though it has been rumored.

The GPUs all also have slightly lower FP32 performance compared to their RX parts, likely due to the thermal constraints presented by the iMac they'll be living in.

“AMD Radeon Pro 5000 series GPUs bring new levels of performance and flexibility to the updated 27-inch iMac,” said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. “The new AMD GPUs offer the optimal combination of compute performance, energy efficiency and outstanding graphics features to power a wide range of applications – from consumer to pro – wherever graphics matter the most.”