Apple Chose Radeon GPUs For Its MacBook Pro 2016

Gimpymoo · 30 Oct 2016 at 18:36

Looks like AMD's decision years ago to focus on mobile/dedicated tech is paying dividends.

Bonjour · 30 Oct 2016 at 18:39

It certainly will do when they finally release an APU with HBM, hopefully next year.

AthlonXP1800 · 31 Oct 2016 at 20:50

I thought Radeon Pro 450, 455 and 460 are all Baffin GPUs based on GCN 1.3 Polaris architecture.

I am astonished to find both Radeon Pro 450 and 455 are not Baffin GPUs it not from 14nm Polaris architecture but 2 different architectures based on 28nm process.

Radeon Pro 460

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2897/radeon-pro-460

It seemed Radeon Pro 460 is the only GPU from Baffin family based on new GCN 1.3 Polaris architecture, the die size is 123mm2 and has 3 billion transistors.

Radeon Pro 455

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2898/radeon-pro-455

Radeon Pro 455 GPU is not from Baffin family but from Saturn family based on old 28nm GCN 1.1 architecture, the die size is 160mm2 and has 2.080 billion transistors. Saturn GPU spec, die size and fabric process looked awful alots like reworked Bonaire Radeon R7 260 GPU with added few new features like boost clock etc and heavily downclocked.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2511/radeon-r7-260

Radeon Pro 450

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2899/radeon-pro-450

Radeon Pro 450 GPU is not either from Baffin and Saturn family but from Venus family based on old 28nm GCN 1.0 architecture, the die size is 123mm2 and has 1.5 billion transistors. Venus GPU spec, die size and fabric process looked awful alots like reworked Cape Verde Radeon HD 7770 GPU with added few new features like boost clock etc and heavily downclocked.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/308/radeon-hd-7770-ghz-edition

Wow AMD or RTG marketing are such a big liar stoop so low, it not cool to conned unsuspected customers who look to buy new Apple Mac Pro book with Radeon Pro 450 and 455 believed it from Polaris 11 and build on 14nm process. Look like both AMD and RTG had bright idea to reuse old GCN 1.0 and 1.1 GPUs, brainwashed people and sell to professional market for massive profits.

It only a matter of time somebody or companies bought it realised AMD and RTG had ripped them off.

TheRealDeal · 31 Oct 2016 at 21:01

AthlonXP1800 said:
I thought Radeon Pro 450, 455 and 460 are all Baffin GPUs based on GCN 1.3 Polaris architecture.

I am astonished to find both Radeon Pro 450 and 455 are not Baffin GPUs it not from 14nm Polaris architecture but 2 different architectures based on 28nm process.

Radeon Pro 460

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2897/radeon-pro-460

It seemed Radeon Pro 460 is the only GPU from Baffin family based on new GCN 1.3 Polaris architecture, the die size is 123mm2 and has 3 billion transistors.

Radeon Pro 455

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2898/radeon-pro-455

Radeon Pro 455 GPU is not from Baffin family but from Saturn family based on old 28nm GCN 1.1 architecture, the die size is 160mm2 and has 2.080 billion transistors. Saturn GPU spec, die size and fabric process looked awful alots like reworked Bonaire Radeon R7 260 GPU with added few new features like boost clock etc and heavily downclocked.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2511/radeon-r7-260

Radeon Pro 450

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2899/radeon-pro-450

Radeon Pro 450 GPU is not either from Baffin and Saturn family but from Venus family based on old 28nm GCN 1.0 architecture, the die size is 123mm2 and has 1.5 billion transistors. Venus GPU spec, die size and fabric process looked awful alots like reworked Cape Verde Radeon HD 7770 GPU with added few new features like boost clock etc and heavily downclocked.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/308/radeon-hd-7770-ghz-edition

Wow AMD or RTG marketing are such a big liar stoop so low, it not cool to conned unsuspected customers who look to buy new Apple Mac Pro book with Radeon Pro 450 and 455 believed it from Polaris 11 and build on 14nm process. Look like both AMD and RTG had bright idea to reuse old GCN 1.0 and 1.1 GPUs, brainwashed people and sell to professional market for massive profits.

It only a matter of time somebody or companies bought it realised AMD and RTG had ripped them off.

This has been a standard practise for a long time now. On the Nvidia side you only have to look at 8800/9800/250 and probably plenty i have forgotten. AMD have also renamed a lot of cards lately and if they are up to the job that Apple wanted them for then it's no problem at all.

Will give Nvidia props though as it's hard to think off there last renamed card.

Minstadave · 31 Oct 2016 at 22:16

Yikes - 28nm GPUs in a flagship laptop at over £2000 :eek:

Jog on Apple.

N19h7m4r3 · 31 Oct 2016 at 23:44

Shame about the 28nm parts on lower GPUs

On the Brightside it seems a Cinema 4D is going to use AMD's ProRender, so Apple users with an AMD card get something nice out of that at least.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/10/maxon-picks-amds-radeon-prorender-for-cinema-4d/

One of the few cross-platform GPU-based rendering solutions
In Maxon’s case, a key deciding factor will have been the popularity of Macs among its user base.

That means one based on the cross-platform OpenCL GPU computing framework, not CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary alternative.

Caracus2k · 1 Nov 2016 at 00:07

Erik13 said:
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

'Biased' PC market WTF! Apple is the very definition of a 'biased' / closed system. The PC market is far less 'biased' /software + hardware agnostic

Apple really do rely on selling their wares to people clueless of the underlying hardware. Still if your customers will still pay the best part of 4k for a nearly three year old (and not particularly cutting edge on release) shiny desktop bin complete with two ageing Tahiti GPU's and an old hex core Intel CPU then you pretty much quid's in!

Cos this spec is worth 3.9K!

3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor
16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory
Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM each
256GB PCIe-based flash storage

Back onto laptops good news for AMD because it guarantees a good volume of sales via Apple's loyal customer base who will pay $$$ for anything with the fruity logo on it.

AllBodies · 1 Nov 2016 at 00:11

N19h7m4r3 said:
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.

Wow, I had no idea Premier pro was SO inefficient.

Dicehunter · 1 Nov 2016 at 03:18

N19h7m4r3 said:
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.

Yeah Adobe needs to severely get on the optimization bandwagon as they've been falling behind FCPX for quite some time.

On a side note though some guy did a comparison between a Mac Pro and a custom PC at half the price, The results *before I knew anything about apple* surprised me -

Bonjour · 1 Nov 2016 at 07:37

I think FCP optimises video clips to ProRes in the background to help speed things up. Ok for casual editors. Not ok for broadcast / movie professionals.

It's not clear in the test above whether they're using the camera native media, 'optimised' or 'proxy' media.

Griffildur · 1 Nov 2016 at 08:07

Erik13 said:
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

This made me chuckle.

You do realise that Apple is the only completely locked down eco system right?

On the PC side we have something which completely lacks on Apple side, it's called choice.

I can choose an AMD product or NVidia, I can choose MSI or Saphire or Zotac or whatever I please. I can have as much memory or disk space as I want.

With Apple you have to buy whatever crap they sell you and you have to call it amazing, otherwise you'd cry thinking how much you just paid for it

.

N19h7m4r3 · 1 Nov 2016 at 08:08

Bonjour said:
I think FCP optimises video clips to ProRes in the background to help speed things up. Ok for casual editors. Not ok for broadcast / movie professionals.

It's not clear in the test above whether they're using the camera native media, 'optimised' or 'proxy' media.

They do have a disclaimer, in the Hardware Canucks video, that background rendering was not used.

And having used both FCPX and PP, FCPX scrubs significantly better even with native media than PP does without "High Quality Playback" and 1/2 media resolution. Selecting Optimized and Proxy makes things significantly faster.

Even when I had two 980ti gpus in the system in my sig it was always slower than the 2013 Mac I had for FCPX in all cases. Darn shame really.

Dicehunter said:
Yeah Adobe needs to severely get on the optimization bandwagon as they've been falling behind FCPX for quite some time.

On a side note though some guy did a comparison between a Mac Pro and a custom PC at half the price, The results *before I knew anything about apple* surprised me -

It's a shame Apple have essentially abandoned the professional Market, the MP still has Ivy bridge processors, nevermind the old Tahiti GPUs.. The Mac Pro 2013 when it launched was really good value; especially with the D700's.

The main issue with it for the Cinebench and Unity tests ran, is OpenGL, It's a mix of two things there.

AMD's terrible OpenGL drivers( especially on OS X and Linux ), and that at the time Apple was busy abandoning OpenGL as well; since they were working on Metal. Apple haven't updated their OpenGL stack since Mavericks; and even then it was never 4.5.

No idea how he got FCPX to take so much longer than on the Windows system; as even a MacBook Pro from late 2013 or early 2014 should beat it.

Sadly Apple locked the decent parts of the 2013 Mac Pro behind a big price jump, and the 6 core and D700's were the sweet spot.

Although some people a bought the Quadcore, and maxed everything else; then simply replaced the CPU themselves with a Hexcore, or even 10 core CPU.

Edit: If only they kept the original form factor, it would have made their neglect a little easier. You could have changed CPU's easily, SSDs, and GPUs.

Hell the 2009-2012 Mac Pro can take everything from NVIDIA, except current Pascal cards. Although NVIDIA are most likely going to release a driver for them soon.

Otherwise you can just use a GTX 980Ti natively in OS X, with the latest NVIDIA OS X driver.

Heck even the RX480 works now. Interestingly enough OS X seems them as Baffin GPUs, not Polaris
http://barefeats.com/sierra_rx480.html
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dual-rx-480s-in-mac-pro-5-1-running-macos-w-how-to.1984213/

KillBoY_UK · 1 Nov 2016 at 09:01

Its all down to MONEY. like with bin Mac Pro's Apple probably got a epic good/cheap deal for there gpus. Nvidia do have a much better PPW atm so price would have been the barging chip they can control.

I'm sure I will get a lot of hate though.

N19h7m4r3 · 1 Nov 2016 at 09:19

KillBoY_UK said:
Its all down to MONEY. like with bin Mac Pro's Apple probably got a epic good/cheap deal for there gpus. Nvidia do have a much better PPW atm so price would have been the barging chip they can control.

I'm sure I will get a lot of hate though. ( HAHA )

It's always only been about money; but it's not the sole issue.

The D700 were close to the £4500 FirePro W9000's, yet a 6 core Mac Pro with 2 D700's cost less than two W9000's on their own. They were simply clocked a little slower, and binned better for power usage.

Also despite NVIDIA's better PPW, the Mac Pro even the 12 Core version made do with a 450W PSU to drive everything.

Apple started phasing out NVIDIA products after that nasty soldering issue, and since then have slowly moved to AMD, and focussed heavily on their API and App optimization, especially in regards to OpenCL and Metal; both babies of Apple.

AMD not only supply GPUs at the lowest rate, but also with the feature sets Apple want. Changing to NVIDIA now means more work for Apple, and we know how much they like to get stuck in their walled garden.
Good thing at least NVIDIA directly still release drivers for their graphics cards for OS X. So if you have an older Mac Pro, as far back as 2009, you can use a GTX 980Ti, and the Pascal driver won't off too long it seems.

Nasher · 1 Nov 2016 at 09:40

And they still still charge about £1000 to much

Also, Apple dropped support for OpenGL some time ago and now has no descent graphics API on it's OS (metal is pretty crap for gaming, lacks many features you find in DirectX and it's a waste of development time coding for one specific API used by a tiny minority). So gaming on them is effectively dead. Which is why your no longer seeing new games ported to Mac.

h4rm0ny · 1 Nov 2016 at 09:42

pmc25 said:
There'll be AMD APUs in Apple products next year, for sure.

No need to wait until 2018.

Isn't that out of sync with Apple's release cycle? How often do Apple redo their Macbooks and iMacs?

Bonjour · 1 Nov 2016 at 10:06

h4rm0ny said:
Isn't that out of sync with Apple's release cycle? How often do Apple redo their Macbooks and iMacs?

Mac Mini is due a refresh.

N19h7m4r3 · 1 Nov 2016 at 10:30

Nasher said:
And they still still charge about £1000 to much

Also, Apple dropped support for OpenGL some time ago and now has no descent graphics API on it's OS (metal is pretty crap for gaming, lacks many features you find in DirectX and it's a waste of development time coding for one specific API used by a tiny minority). So gaming on them is effectively dead. Which is why your no longer seeing new games ported to Mac.

Really? Feral Interactive is still porting games to OS X right now. They haven't stopped yet.

They just released Civ 6 for OS X, only 3 days after the Windows release. They're still extremely active, and also do Linux ports now.

Even Deus Ex Mankind Divided, and Warhammer Total War are being ported to OS X, and Linux.

https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/666/

Bonjour · 1 Nov 2016 at 10:41

Civ V is one of the only games I play on my Macs.