AMD has shared some technical details on the new Radeon Pro graphics cards included in the 15-inch MacBook Pro models, giving some insight into their performance and the differences between the three options.
The Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics are built on AMD's Polaris architecture and are fabricated using the 14nm FinFET process to achieve high performance without sacrificing power efficiency. They offer memory bandwidth of up to 80GB/s.
The Radeon Pro Graphics found in the MacBook Pro feature the latest Polaris architecture with 4th generation Graphics Core Next. Speed through your tasks with up to 16 compute units (1024 stream processors) and 1.86 Teraflops of horsepower. Radeon Pro Graphics on the MacBook accelerate workloads normally reserved for the main processor. It features versatile asynchronous compute, updated shader engines, enhanced memory compression and new geometry capabilities in a compact and efficient package.
The Radeon Pro 460, available as a $200 upgrade in the entry-level 15-inch MacBook Pro and a $100 upgrade in the higher-end 15-inch MacBook Pro, offers 1.86 Teraflops of horsepower and 16 compute units (1024 stream processors).
The Radeon Pro 455, the default option in the higher-end 15-inch MacBook Pro, features 1.3 Teraflops of horsepower and 12 compute units (768 stream processors). The Radeon Pro 450, available in the entry-level 15-inch MacBook Pro as the default option, offers 1 Teraflop of horsepower and 10 compute units (640 stream processors).
According to AMD, the Radeon Pro graphics processors inside the MacBook Pro are thinner than a US penny with a Z-height of 1.5mm but still pack in 3 billion transistors. The Radeon Pro features "advanced power technology" to allow the MacBook Pro to stay cool and quiet even during demanding tasks.
On its MacBook Pro website, Apple says the 15-inch MacBook Pro offers up to 130 percent faster graphics performance (with the Radeon 460) and up to 2.5x more computing power per watt compared to the previous-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro uses integrated graphics instead of discrete graphics, but Apple says the Iris Graphics 550 are up to 103 percent faster than the Iris Graphics 6100 in the previous-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro.
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I'm sorry but this is truly pathetic. They only offer up to the 460 in even the top end MacBook Pro. Where's the 470 or even 480? You can spend nearly 5 grand after tax on the maxed out MacBook Pro and you're getting an AMD 460 and 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. Please tell me how Apple is not trying to rob everyone blind? Prices haven't been this absurd in a very long time.
I feel like they went for AMD because of cost (more profits), not performance.
They're offering a 120 dollar GPU in a 2300+ dollar machine. This is penny pinching to the extreme. And they don't even offer a better option, no matter how much you want to spend. It's unbelievable. I thought they would give better options this time, but the only thing they've increased this year is the price.
