Apple’s upcoming iMac Pro — due in December — will sport an AMD Radeon Pro Vega card. If it’s the Frontier Edition, the all-in-one will be, as best I can tell, home to the fastest graphic card around. The Radeon Pro Vega is over three times faster than any previous iMac GPU, packing the power of a double-wide graphics card into a single chip.
The new “non-pro” iMacs sport Radeon Pro 500 Series graphics, which deliver up to 5.5 TFLOPS of performance. It seems logical that the iMac Pro will pack the Pro Vega card, which boasts a High Bandwidth Cache Controller, the cornerstone of the advanced GPU memory architecture. Combined with HBM2, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition helps expands the capacity of traditional GPU memory to 256TB, allowing users to tackle massive datasets quickly. The result is a graphics card that can easily handle demanding design, rendering, and machine intelligence workloads.
AMD announced the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition in May. It’s a high-end card that’s aimed at professionals and workstations, not necessarily gamers. AMD suggested gamers wait “a little while longer” for a Radeon RX Vega card that will be cheaper and gaming-optimized. Who knows? Perhaps it’s that card that will appear in the iMac Pro.
