It was only a couple of days ago that AMD announced its latest Radeon Pro 5000M series mobile GPU. The new Radeon Pro 5600M is an Apple exclusive that will find its way into the 16″ MacBook Pro. This top-tier offering is already showing impressive gains over its predecessor, the 5500M. Max Tech posted a video review of the new MacBook Pro featuring AMD’s high-end mobile GPU. In it, he pitted the 5600M against other cards such as the Vega 20 4 GB, Vega 48, Vega 56, 5300M 4 GB, and 5500M 8 GB. He used several different synthetic benchmarking tools along with exporting video footage for some real-world use scenarios.
As you can see, the 5600M pretty much trounces its siblings in every test, sometimes by up to 50 percent. It even manages to get within striking distance of the 5K iMac Vega 48 in Geekbench 5 Metal. The Radeon Pro 5600M is obviously making use of its premium HBM2 memory. Based on a 7 nm process, it is, however, proving to be an efficient and powerful solution in the mobile arena. It should also be noted that Max Tech stated they were testing without the MacBook being plugged into an outlet. This makes these scores all the more impressive, since it demonstrates the efficiency of the GPU while on battery.
Desktop, or Go Mobile?
This particular variant does come with a hefty price tag, though. The Apple 16″ MacBook Pro, featuring the 5600M, 16 GB 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM, 512 GB SSD, and a 6-core, 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 is currently priced at $3199 at B&H Photo Video. In numerous benches, it ranked favorably with the iMac Pro 5K Vega 48. Another takeaway is that the desktop counterpart costs $3049 when similarly configured from Adorama. That iMacPro does have a higher clocked i5 6-core processor at 3.7 GHz. In the end, it could leave potential buyers wondering if the smaller mobile laptop is the better value.