AMD introduces thin and efficient Radeon Pro 400 GPUs

AMD has announced a new line of GPUs: the Radeon Pro 400 series. There will initially be three models, one of which will make its debut in the 15″ MacBook Pro. AMD claims to have made the Polaris GPUs thinner and more efficient.

AMD produces the Radeon Pro GPUs on a 14nm finfet process and has applied that thinning in manufacturing. The thickness of the wafers has been reduced from 780 micrometers to 380 micrometers. This allows manufacturers of laptops, all-in-ones and mini PCs to create thinner designs or use space differently. The GPUs have TDPs of less than 35W.

They are the first Polaris-based GPUs intended for laptops, but AMD mainly focuses on use for graphics professionals. The first laptops to be equipped with the GPUs are new MacBook Pro models with a 15.6 “screen. This model contains the Radeon Pro 450 as standard, but more expensive versions have the Pro 455 and 460. Apple claimed that the new laptop with the 3D graphics rendering performs 130 percent better than the old 15” MacBook Pro.

The previous standard GPU of the MacBook Pro was the Radeon M370x, which with 1024 gflops has comparable pure computing power, but probably a considerably higher consumption. In addition, the Polaris architecture brings improvements over the Southern Islands ‘Cape Verde’ GPU on which the M370x is based. As a result, the raw performance has not been significantly improved, but optimizations have been made for specific applications. AMD introduced the architecture of these GPUs back in 2012.

It is not yet known when the Polaris-based GPUs for consumer laptops will arrive. Last summer AMD unveiled the Radeon RX 480M, which is also a Polaris 11 GPU with 35W TDP, but it hasn’t been officially released yet.