AMD talks up the Radeon Pro 500 Series found in Apple’s new iMacs

By Mark Coppock June 6, 2017

amd details power and efficiency of radeon pro 500 series — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017 on Monday, where it introduced refreshed iMac desktops and the upcoming iMac Pro. AMD GPUs were heavily featured at the event, including a new family of Radeon Pro graphics processors.

Now, AMD has provided some additional details on the new Radeon Pro 500 series, which features chips from the last-generation “Polaris” architecture. The Radeon Pro 500 Series is aimed at creative professionals like artists, designer, engineers, filmmakers who are worried as much about efficiency as about all-out gaming performance.

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In terms of sheer performance, the Radeon Pro 500 Series offers up to 5.5 TFLOPS of sheer performance enabling virtual reality (VR) support on the high-end Radeon Pro 580 and solid gaming performance throughout the line. This level of performance is provided by 36 Compute Units with 2,304 stream processors, with a level of power operating efficiency that lets them maintain full performance in the confines of today’s all-in-one devices like the new Apple iMacs.

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More important for the target audience, Radeon Pro 500 chips provide GPU acceleration for a number of applications including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, Foundry Nuke, Mari, and Modo. Optimal performance is enabled with Radeon ProRender photorealistic ray-tracing rendering technology in Autodesk Maya and Maxon’s Cinema 4D.

As Raja Kodur, senior vice president and chief architect for the AMD Radeon Technologies Group put it, “It is incredibly satisfying to see the capabilities of Radeon Pro 500 series in elegant form factors and enabling amazing content creation, gaming, and VR experiences. Radeon Pro 500 Series graphics are enabling new generations of makers with compute-accelerated creative tools and new APIs, bringing their imaginations to life in ways like never before.”

The Radeon Pro 500 Series is available for the first time in the iMac, which ranges in price from $1,099 for the entry-level 21.5-inch model all the way up to a starting price of $2,299 for the 27.5-inch 5K iMac. These machines are available for purchase today and for delivery this week at the Apple Store.

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