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Apple Now Offering Radeon Pro W5500X for Mac Pro

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Apr 12, 2001
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Apple's Mac Pro can now be configured with a Radeon Pro W5550X with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a graphics card option that's a step above the entry-level Radeon Pro 580X but not as expensive as the W5700X graphics card that Apple introduced as an option in April.

radeonprow5500x.jpg

Upgrading a Mac Pro with the Radeon Pro W5550X costs an additional $200 over the base price of the machine.
The AMD Radeon Pro W5500X with 8GB of GDDR6 memory is based on AMD's RDNA architecture, featuring up to 5.6 teraflops of single-precision performance or 11.2 teraflops of half-precision computing. It supports up to four 4K displays, one 5K display, or one Pro Display XDR.
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The Radeon Pro W5500X can also be purchased as a standalone half-height MPX Module for $600.

Article Link: Apple Now Offering Radeon Pro W5500X for Mac Pro
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/01/apple-mac-pro-w5500x-gpu/
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Anyone been able to find out what outputs are on this? Is it HDMI only like the default graphics card or does it actually have HDMI and THunderbolt3/USB-C?
 
That is pretty good only 6 months has gone bye and Apple has already improved the performance of the entry level video card for the Mac Pro. My last Mac Pro lasted 10 years, but I chanced strategy's and got a 3k MacBook Pro instead of a 6k tower and going to replace it every 3 to 5 years for upgrade in technology. I love my MacBook Pro 16 and I can put it in my laptop bag and off to a Mac User Group meeting or the library. The old poor Mac Pro 2009 had to set home most of the time when I was working.
 
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jlocker said:
That is pretty good only 6 months has gone bye and Apple has already improved the performance of the entry level video card for the Mac Pro. My last Mac Pro lasted 10 years, but I chanced strategy's and got a 3k MacBook Pro instead of a 6k tower and going to replace it every 3 to 5 years for upgrade in technology. I love my MacBook Pro 16 and I can put it in my laptop bag and off to a Mac User Group meeting or the library. The old poor Mac Pro 2009 had to set home most of the time when I was working.
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Accept they didn't.... this one is $200 more, an upgrade from the entry level video card, which has no business being in this machine. =)

That screen shot is misleading... the 580X is still there.
 
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Don't be like me and buy one of these now. You'll get a few years and then you can't take advantage of the faster performance and benefits from new code written for FCPX with Apple Silicon. I should have gone with a MacbookPro 16 fully spec'ed instead of $14K for the 2019 MacPro. Replacing the MacbookPro hurts a lot less in a few years when the benefits of the APL Silicon kick in.
 
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Plutonius said:
I wonder how many people are spending money on a new Mac Pro now considering that the entire Mac line will be replaced with ARM in 2-5 years ?
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If you need a Mac Pro - style machine, chances are you don’t have time to wait. And your chances of really needing Intel are much higher if you’re a Mac Pro buyer than if you are a macbook air buyer.
 
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jameslmoser said:
Accept they didn't.... this one is $200 more, an upgrade from the entry level video card, which has no business being in this machine. =)

That screen shot is misleading... the 580X is still there.
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NAVI drivers are still garbage as far as I can tell from what I read, although less garbage. Apple had to ship something stable to users and the 580X is that, with VEGA II coming in second, but there’s no way that Apple could have sold the Mac Pro with the VEGA II as the base GPU for $6,000.
 
Plutonius said:
I wonder how many people are spending money on a new Mac Pro now considering that the entire Mac line will be replaced with ARM in 2-5 years ?
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If you’re a video pro you can likely afford it. Certainly in that specific high end world these machines only last a few years, so Apple’s move to Apple Sillicon isn’t an issue. For anyone else I wouldn’t recommend it though. Previously designers and photo pros all used the Mac Pro, but most of them moved over to the iMac or a MacBook Pro.
 
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I noticed the usual ARM-related comments in this thread, and I have to wonder...

The new Mac Pro is fairly modular, right? Perhaps Apple intends to eventually release an ARM CPU module for it, to allow people to keep their investment in the platform but move to the new processors?

Just a thought. I figure they might do it this time since they JUST released the Mac Pro and announced the ARM transition so soon. They have to offer SOMETHING to people who buy this machine in the next few months.
 
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Plutonius said:
I wonder how many people are spending money on a new Mac Pro now considering that the entire Mac line will be replaced with ARM in 2-5 years ?
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Well if you got to do high performance work for the next 5 years a Xeon on server/workstation processor has a lot of workflow performance with this processor and it uses ECC memory. Intel is going to be improving the Xeon processor over the next 5 years. Xeon's are the backbone of server farms. So it is going to be very hard for Apple catch up with performance with this processor. Can they do it, I think they can but Intel is not going away and they will be upgrading their processors. It is like Apple is a car company and they can build a chevy 6 cylinder motor and Intel is like is like Caterpillar truck engines. They are both motors but they don't have the same horse power, torque or hours of operation.

Will Apple be able to do it? I believe they can but it is a long road to get there, they got the cash now they need to use it.
 
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zorinlynx said:
I noticed the usual ARM-related comments in this thread, and I have to wonder...

The new Mac Pro is fairly modular, right? Perhaps Apple intends to eventually release an ARM CPU module for it, to allow people to keep their investment in the platform but move to the new processors?

Just a thought. I figure they might do it this time since they JUST released the Mac Pro and announced the ARM transition so soon. They have to offer SOMETHING to people who buy this machine in the next few months.
Click to expand...

The Mac Pro is probably going to be one of the, if not the, last machine that gets the ARM treatment. It'll be a a couple of years before that happens. Anyone that orders a Mac Pro right now knows exactly what they're doing, and I'm not sure it makes sense for the company to offer concessions today for a machine that's not going to have an upgrade path for a couple of years.
 
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It depends what you will be doing whether this card is better than the 580X or not. It would be a little better for video & graphics, but worse for compute. The FP64 double precision performance is lower than the 580X, but for that you would want the Vega II anyways. Or even the older Mac Pro 6,1 with D700s which have about the same FP64 performance as the Vega II, and of course there are two of them, so same as a Duo.
 
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What's the conversion of teraflops to gigawatts?

Every time I see that word... It looks like someone just made it up.
 
Single-Core ScoreMulti-Core Score
404841962
Geekbench 4.3.4 Tryout for Windows x86 (64-bit)
Result Information
Upload DateJune 01 2020 03:34 AM
Views491
System Information
System Information
Operating SystemMicrosoft Windows Server 2019 Standard (64-bit)
Modelempty S5645
Motherboardempty S5645
Memory255.67 GB -1MHz
NorthbridgeIntel ID09A2 03
SouthbridgeIntel IDA1CB 0A
BIOSAmerican Megatrends Inc. V0.004
Processor Information
NameIntel $0000
Topology1 Processor, 24 Cores, 48 Threads
IdentifierGenuineIntel Family 6 Model 106 Stepping 4
Base Frequency2.19 GHz
Maximum Frequency2.89 GHz
Package
Codename
L1 Instruction Cache32.0 KB x 24
L1 Data Cache48.0 KB x 24
L2 Cache1.25 MB x 24
L3 Cache36.0 MB x 1
Single-Core Performance
Memory Score4642
Floating Point Score3921
Integer Score3832
Crypto Score4384
Single-Core Score4048

This is what you get with a upgraded Xeon processor for a score. With so many people talking about scores. :)
 
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Does anyone know if the site was down for this GPU to be added? Or would this have been added in the site refresh two weeks ago alongside the new 16” card and the back to school deal?
 
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