AMD unveils Radeon 7 graphics card likely to appear in future pro Macs

AMD on Wednesday announced its next flagship graphics card, the Radeon 7, which it touted as the world's first 7-nanometer gaming GPU.

The card is claimed to offer 25 percent faster performance than earlier Vega cards, such as those used for the iMac Pro, AMD said during a CES keynote. To demonstrate, the company showed a preview of Capcom's upcoming action game "Devil May Cry 5," which ran in 4K resolution with framerates over 100 frames per second. Current games like "Battlefield V" are said to run at 60fps or more with maximum settings.

AMD is using 16 gigabytes of memory, offering bandwidth up to 1 terabyte per second. Processing happens on 60 compute units clocked at up to 1.8 gigahertz.

The Radeon 7 should ship Feb. 7 for $699.

Apple, a regular AMD customer, will presumably want to use some version of the card in future iMac Pro configurations, as well as its still secretive successor to the 2013 Mac Pro. The latter will be Apple's first modular computer in many years, finally letting hobbyists and professionals upgrade Macs gradually instead of having to wait for complete redesigns. Barring delays it's due to ship sometime in 2019.

The cost and size of the new Radeon will presumably keep it out of standard iMacs, where a sleek design is valued over performance.

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21 Comments

TEAMSWITCHER 113 comments · 15 Years

About 5 years ago

I really want to see the return of Nvidia Macs. Tim Cook ... make this happen.

MacPro 19838 comments · 18 Years

Please no. At least give a BTO option for either one or a pair of high-end Nvidia cards in a next-generation MacPro.

racerhomie3 1264 comments · 7 Years

TEAMSWITCHER said:

I really want to see the return of Nvidia Macs. Tim Cook ... make this happen.

Nvidea seeks too much control. No way.

mdriftmeyer 7395 comments · 20 Years

The MI60 custom OEM ASIC will be in the Mac Pro. These are MI60 cut downs by 4 Computational Units (CU). They are a direct equivalent sans the professional drivers and focus being on Machine Learning.

Apple will never use Nvidia as Apple's focus runs in-line with AMD and its hardware. Apple develops the entire driver stack for AMD's cards. Dual 16GB HBM2 Vega 20s will be a beast, and at a far lower price point.

The RTX 2080 is slower than Vega II and over $100 more.

Google Stream is using the Vega II for its streaming data centers along with EPYC 2. It's a value proposition combo that Nvidia/Intel can't touch.

hodar 366 comments · 14 Years

I foresee another NVIDIA Driver release, which will "magically" close the gap with the competition. This is a tried and true tactic, that NVIDIA has been doing for decades. When they release a chip-set, there are features that are intentionally disabled, so that he competition can try to catch up, or beat them - only to be defeated by the "features" that the new driver enables.