AMD Radeon Pro 5000 series GPUs will bring big graphics improvements to iMac

Wednesday, August 5, 2020 12:55 PM


Today, Apple announced updates to the iMac lineup  While there were small bumps to the 21.5 inch iMac and the iMac Pro, most of the love was saved for the 27-inch iMac, which starts at $1799.00. Although the new 10th-generation CPUs, 1080p webcam (finally), and nano-texture display options have stolen the headlines, the new 7 nm AMD Radeon Pro 5000 Series GPU options are a pretty big deal as well.

Lesser configs, like the entry level model and mid-tier $1,999.00 model are stuck with the Radeon Pro 5300 with 4GB of GDDR6 memory. If you opt for these configurations, you’ll notice that there are no upgrade paths to the higher tiered 5000 series GPU models.

While that Radeon Pro 5300 will undoubtedly provide a noticeable performance improvement over its baseline predecessor, the Radeon Pro 570X found in the 2019 iMac, users who find themselves involved in graphics-intensive operations on a regular basis may want to consider ponying up $2,299.00 to gain access to higher-specced GPU options.

Apple offers four AMD Radeon Pro 5000 Series GPU options for the 27-inch iMac:


Compute Units
Stream Processors
Peak Clock
TFLOPS
Memory
Memory Bandwidth
Mem Speed
Radeon Pro 5300
20
1280
1650MHz
Up to 4.2
Up to 4GB
224GB/s
14Gbps
Radeon Pro 5500 XT
24
1536
1757MHz
Up to 5.3
Up to 8GB
224GB/s
14Gbps
Radeon Pro 5700
36
2304
1350MHz
Up to 6.2
Up to 8GB
384GB/s
12Gbps
Radeon Pro 5700 XT
40
2560
1499MHz
Up to 7.6
Up to 16GB
384GB/s
12Gbps

Built on AMD’s 7-nanometer process, the Radeon Pro 5000 series with RDNA microarchitecture offers faster and smaller transistors that require less power. These updates should prove to be a substantial upgrade over the 14 nm Polaris-based lineup of GPUs in the 2019 iMac.