Apple has announced that its new Macbooks Pro line will be equipped with Vega graphics. The first version is the Vega Pro 16 and the second is the Vega pro 20, which is expected to be launched in November, although it will only reach the 15-inch version of the MacBook Pro.
Apple bets on the AMD GPU technology, why not Nvidia?
In a press release after the presentation, AMD notes that this new Vega Pro notebook architecture offers incredible performance for 3D rendering, photo editing, and video editing. Even Triple A video games and eSports can be played in ultra-quality at 1080p resolution.
Apple has already praised the expected performance of the Radeon Pro Vega on the mobile Mac. Graphics performance should be 60 percent faster in the areas of video processing, 3D design, and rendering. Here’s a selection of words from apple.com.
Radeon Pro Vega Graphics Performance
The 15-inch MacBook Pro now has Radeon Pro Vega GPU options, the first independent Vega GPUs on a notebook. With the same graphics architecture as iMac Pro, Vega offers an improved computing engine and uses high-bandwidth memory (HBM2). HBM2 doubles the memory bandwidth of the GPU and consumes much less power. In this way, the GPU itself can use most of the performance provided for graphics. The result is significantly faster graphics performance – up to 60% faster than Radeon Pro 560X15 for demanding video, 3D, rendering, and high-volume data tasks.
These new Vegas Pro will have HBM2 memory and it is mentioned that the chip will take up less space than a GDDR5.
The Vega Pro is delivered in a manufacturing process at 14nm. Both the Vega Pro 14 and the Vega Pro 20 have 4 GB and can only be selected in the model of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touchbar, which starts with a price of 2,799 dollars and has the already integrated eighth-generation i7 or i9 Intel processor depending on the configuration the user purchases.
According to AMD, the new GPUs introduced in January are manufactured using the FinFET process of 14 nm. The previous AMD nomenclature suggests that the Vega variant comprises 16 units of 1024 shader cores, i.e. 16 computing units with 64 flow processors each. According to this calculation, Vega 20 would have 1280 current processors. Unlike the Vega-GPU in the Kaby-Lake-G processor, this is a true Vega chip with a high-bandwidth cache controller, improved geometry unit and Rapid Packed Math called double performance FP16. Like other Vega models, mobile chips also access HBM2 memory, which is on the same chip holder as the graphics processor and connects to it through a silicon buffer.