Today, AMD took the wraps of the Radeon Pro 5600M mobile graphics card. Apple has already got dibs on the new Navi-powered offering, as the Radeon Pro 5600M is making its debut inside the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
The Radeon Pro 5600M marks the debut of AMD's latest Navi 12 silicon that's the outcome of TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. The Navi 12 silicon features a multi-chip design win a single 7nm GPU die in the center that's flanked by two 16 Gbit (4 GB) HBM2 memory chips on both sides.
On a deeper level, the Navi 12 die is composed of 40 Compute Units, which work out to a total of 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs). This is the highest number of SPs on any mobile Navi graphics card and shockingly matches that of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, one of the best graphics cards for desktop PCs. But don't get too excited just yet: The Radeon Pro 5600M adheres to a 50W TGP (total graphics power) rating, so its clock speeds are significantly lower than that of the desktop RX 5700 XT.
AMD Radeon Pro 5000M-Series Specifications
| Graphics Card | GPU Architecture | Compute Units | Stream Processors | Boost Clock (MHz) | FP32 Performance (TFLOPS) | Memory | Memory Speed (Gbps) | Memory Interface | Memory Bandwidth (GBps) | TDP (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon Pro 5600M | RDNA (Navi 12) | 40 | 2,560 | 1,035 | 5.3 | 8GB HBM2 | 1.54 | 2048-bit | 394 | 50 |
| Radeon Pro 5500M | RDNA (Navi 14) | 24 | 1,536 | 1,300 | 4.0 | 8GB GDDR6 | 12 | 128-bit | 192 | 50 |
| Radeon Pro 5300M | RDNA (Navi 14) | 20 | 1,280 | 1,250 | 3.2 | 4GB GDDR6 | 12 | 128-bit | 192 | 50 |
AMD advertises the Radeon Pro 5600M with a boost clock up to 1,035 MHz, which is the slowest out of the three Navi mobile graphics card. However, the Radeon Pro 5600M counters the lower boost clock speed with more SPs. This allows the graphics card to deliver up to 5.3 TFLOPS of single-precision (FP32) floating point performance, which is 32.5% higher than the Radeon Pro 5500M.
It's impractical to compare a mobile graphics card to a desktop, as the latter generally have more room to stretch their legs. But for fun, let's see how the Radeon Pro 5500M compares to the Radeon RX 5700 XT given their similar SP count.
The Radeon RX 5700 XT sports a 1,905 MHz boost clock, so theoretically the graphics card pumps out 9.8 TFLOPs in comparison to the Radeon Pro 5600M's 5.3 TFLOPs. That's a big, but much expected, difference of 84.9%.
The biggest surprise with the Radeon Pro 5600M is the multi-chip format that enables AMD to ditch the GDDR6 memory for speedy HBM2. The HBM2 memory inside the Radeon Pro 5600M runs at 1.54 Gbps across a 2048-bit memory interface and results in a memory bandwidth of 394 GBps, 105.2% higher than the Radeon Pro 5500M. The Radeon RX 5700 XT is good for 448.0 GBps, so it only offers 13.7% more memory bandwidth than the Radeon Pro 5600M.
In conclusion, the Radeon Pro 5600M is almost like an unofficial mobile version of AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT but with HBM2.
Sadly, we don't know if the graphics card will be available with PC vendors besides Apple. We reached out to AMD for a comment, but the chipmaker told us that it doesn't comment on future product directions.
