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Apple Chose Radeon GPUs For Its MacBook Pro 2016

Apparently Microsoft have gone with Nvidia for their forthcoming Surface Book 2. Soon you'll be able to get a Surface Book with an NVidia 9** chip - WTF? :D. No mobile 1070 or 1080 but a 900 series.....
 
to me this is a non news story. AMD has been Apple's go to GPU for years and as the OP says already has the Desktop and Workstations sewn up. Apple are hardly going to turn round and say "Sorry AMD we want Nvidia for our Mac Book Pros".

Good for them but nothing to see here.
 
DarrenM343 said:
Apparently Microsoft have gone with Nvidia for their forthcoming Surface Book 2. Soon you'll be able to get a Surface Book with an NVidia 9** chip - WTF? :D. No mobile 1070 or 1080 but a 900 series.....
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Yeah and it'll cost £3000 and still overheat on the dock like ****. Surface devices way over priced, terribly designed and blind you to their sleek looks. Once they go wrong they are a ******.
Senior Managers at work started wanting them cos they look cool but they are terrible when they go wrong to fix and overheat like crazy. Part of the problem is the dock covers vents and also some of the Managers complain they get too hot to hold and yes thats because you've got your hand over the **** vent.
 
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varkanoid said:
Yeah and it'll cost £3000 and still overheat on the dock like ****. Surface devices way over priced, terribly designed and blind you to their sleek looks. Once they go wrong they are a ******.
Senior Managers at work started wanting them cos they look cool but they are terrible when they go wrong to fix and overheat like crazy. Part of the problem is the dock covers vents and also some of the Managers complain they get too hot to hold and yes thats because you've got your hand over the **** vent.
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Sounds like another award winning design.
"But, It looks so pretty"
 
Minstadave said:
Didn't Apple get burnt by Nvidias dodgy GPU solder back in the day?
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Yes, big time.
Apple were also the only OEM who actually stood by their customers offering repairs to 'fix' affected machines. Of course since all those Nvidia parts were faulty, all they could do was to replace the motherboards but those would eventually fail too. Heard that some people had their Macbook Pro's logic board replaced 2-3 times.

Anyway, Polaris 11 is meant to have been made on extra thin wafers and as soon as that news came out it pointed to the fruity company so crazy for extra thinness even their computers might soon bend when used...

Also, gaining under DX11 or even DX12 is hardly what Apple cares about: OpenCL and Metal performance is. And there is no guarantee that GP107 downclocked to 35W would offer there same performance.
 
It's not a strange choice at all. Apple like to lock consumers into their ecosystem, they don't let vendors lock them into shenanigans.

If there s a Zen based Mac product, it'll likely be the last of the X86 Macs before they start using their own ARM CPUs :p
 
there hasnt been a macbook pro in a while
my friend has one and she keeps spending money on getting it repaired >.<
 
KompuKare said:
Yes, big time.
Apple were also the only OEM who actually stood by their customers offering repairs to 'fix' affected machines. Of course since all those Nvidia parts were faulty, all they could do was to replace the motherboards but those would eventually fail too. Heard that some people had their Macbook Pro's logic board replaced 2-3 times.

Anyway, Polaris 11 is meant to have been made on extra thin wafers and as soon as that news came out it pointed to the fruity company so crazy for extra thinness even their computers might soon bend when used...

Also, gaining under DX11 or even DX12 is hardly what Apple cares about: OpenCL and Metal performance is. And there is no guarantee that GP107 downclocked to 35W would offer there same performance.
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They use a process called die thinning:

http://creators.radeon.com/radeon-pro/

The Radeon Pro Graphics processor found on the MacBook Pro is thinner than a US penny with a Z-height of only 1.5 mm.
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http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/radeon-pro-400-2016oct27.aspx

To enable the thinnest graphics processor possible, AMD also employs a complex process known as ‘die thinning’ to reduce the thickness of each wafer of silicon used in the processor from 780 microns to just 380 microns, or slightly less than the thickness of four pieces of paper.
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maonayze said:
On another note, I would like to say that putting that kind of GFX card spec into a Macbook and having the audacity to call it a MacBook PRO is taking the **** to say the least. If it was a 480 it would have been okay I suppose, but a 460 ???
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They've never had high-end GPUs, there wouldn't be much point either. Hell, some of them just had Intel graphics.
 
maonayze said:
On another note, I would like to say that putting that kind of GFX card spec into a Macbook and having the audacity to call it a MacBook PRO is taking the **** to say the least. If it was a 480 it would have been okay I suppose, but a 460 ???
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TheVoice said:
They've never had high-end GPUs, there wouldn't be much point either. Hell, some of them just had Intel graphics.
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Apple relies on Optimization for their small hardware ecosystem when it comes to their prosumer and professional applications to get the best performance.

Sure something like the RX 480,would be fantastic, but even with their lacklustre hardware their entire ecosystem matches or beats out a far more powerful custom windows system; in video editing at least.

I wish Adobe Premiere Pro took advantage of hardware as much as FCPX does; although with all the various hardware combinations I doubt we'll ever get close.


 
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the nvidia gpu in the surface book isnt no monster :p
i guess thats the main competition right now? if apple cares on that stuff
 
Good news for AMD.

I can only assume this decision was being looked at over the last few months by Apple, in which case for something in the <75w TDP bracket the 460 was a no brainer as the 1050/ti wasn't available until this last week.

Regardless it s still good news for AMD.
 
Professional video editors have been moving away from FCPX for years. PCs provide a better platform for DaVinci Resolve and Avid is the dominant video editing software for broadcast television and movies. FCPX is really 'prosumer' rather than professional.
 
Amd is making wise choice by getting away from biased Windows Pc market. This is exactly what i said few years ago, start exploring other posibilities outside classic windows market
 
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