AMD's new Radeon Pro 400 series finds a home with Apple

Apple unveiled its new 15-inch MacBook Pro today, something that includes AMD's new Polaris-based Radeon Pro 400 series graphics, available first inside of the new 15-inch MBP.

AMD's new Radeon Pro 400 series graphics is explained perfectly on the Radeon Pro website, which details the new Polaris GPU as the best choice for creators.

Radeon Technologies Group SVP and Chief Architect, Raja Koduri, explains: "We couldn't be more proud to have Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics launching in the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, a notebook designed for performance and creativity".

There are three new Radeon Pro 400 series SKUs:

• Radeon Pro 460 - 1.86TFLOPs/16 CUs/1024 SPs
• Radeon Pro 455 - 1.3TFLOPs/12 CUs/768 SPs
• Radeon Pro 450 - 1TFLOPs/10 CUs/640 SPs

AMD has utilized some advanced process techniques with the Radeon Pro 400 series, using "die thinning" which reduces the thickness of each wafer of silicon used in the GPU from 780 microns, to just 380 microns - as thin as four pieces of paper. This allows the Radeon Pro 400 series to have a TDP of just 35W, offering ssome great performance in a small power envelope.

The company launched its new "Meet the Creators" program with the Radeon Pro 400 series, which the company explains as: "The "Meet the Creators" program will also explore how Radeon Pro graphics play a role in the creative process, from harnessing extraordinary graphics performance in today's popular 2D and 3D creative applications, to using modern low-overhead graphics and compute APIs to accelerate rendering in today's workflows. A part of that workflow is Radeon ProRender, AMD's physically-based rendering engine planned for open source later this year, and supported via plugins across many popular 3D content creation applications including Autodesk® Maya®, and a beta plugin for Rhino®. Bolstering the list of supported applications, AMD and Maxon announced today that Radeon ProRender software will be available in a future release of Maxon's powerful and intuitive Cinema 4D application for 3D modeling, animation and rendering, providing GPU-accelerated performance on Mac by leveraging Radeon Pro graphics and Apple's Metal API".