AMD unveils Radeon Pro 400 series of GPUs

AMD has revealed a new line of graphics processors called the Radeon Pro 400 Series, saying it's for "artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, visualizers and engineers that shape the modern content creation era." The Radeon Pro 450, the Radeon Pro 455, and the Radeon Pro 460 were announced as the three GPUs in the series. The first place you'll be able to get your hands on the Pro 450 is in the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, which Apple announced yesterday.

They are based on the Polaris architecture, and AMD claims it has achieved the thinnest graphics processor possible by using die thinning to "reduce the thickness of each wafer of silicon used in the processor from 780 microns to just 380 microns." That's a bit less than four pieces of paper stacked up. They're pretty energy efficient too, with all of the 400 Series operating in a thermal envelope under 35W. They'll each have an HDMI out via a USB-C adapter, and a DisplayPort 1.2 output.

There are some basic specs for the cards on the new Radeon Pro Creators website. The Radeon Pro 450 has up to 1 teraflop peak performance, 10 compute units (640 stream processors) and 80GB/s memory bandwidth. The next step up is the Radeon Pro 455, with up to 1.3 teraflops peak performance, 12 compute units (768 stream processors), and 80GB/s memory bandwidth. The most powerful of the new cards is the Radeon Pro 460, with up to 1.86 teraflops peak performance, 16 compute units (1024 stream processors), and also 80GB/s memory bandwidth.

None of these even come close to AMD's latest desktop GPUs, with the least powerful, the RX 460, clocking in at up to 2.2 teraflops peak performance. So, don't expect to be getting huge gaming performance out of the Radeon Pro 450, 455, and 460 when they're released.