Apple could be centered on Macs with in-house silicon, however that does not imply it is fully neglecting the Intel-based fashions. The tech agency has updated the Mac Pro with new high-end GPU choices that promise massive strides ahead for graphics- and compute-intensive apps. AMD’s Radeon Pro W6800X, W6800X Duo (proven right here) and W6900X playing cards tout 50 p.c improved efficiency per watt over their Vega II predecessors, Apple claimed, and that interprets to important velocity boosts in related apps.

You can anticipate as much as 84 p.c higher efficiency within the Octane X rendering app, Apple mentioned. The 26 p.c and 23 p.c claimed jumps in Cinema 4D and DaVinci Resolve aren’t fairly so impressive-sounding, however they’re nonetheless significant should you’re both shopping for a brand new Mac Pro or upgrading from one of many extra modest GPUs.

Apple is not shy in regards to the origins — these are workstation-oriented parallels to the Radeon RX 6800 and 6900 sequence client boards. The greatest variations, as you may guess, are tweaks to cater to the professional market. All of them embrace 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 connector, and so they help an Infinity Fabric Link that lets as much as 4 GPUs (similar to two W6800X Duo modules) discuss to one another 5 occasions sooner than PCIe. Both particular person GPUs embrace 32GB of GDDR6 reminiscence, whereas the W6800X Duo unsurprisingly consists of 64GB.

These GPUs are changing the Vega II and Vega II Duo playing cards within the lineup, and so they’re priced accordingly. It will value you $2,400 additional to configure a brand new Mac Pro with the W6800X inside, $4,600 for the W6800X Duo, and $5,600 for the W6900X. Go all-out and you’ll spend $9,600 on two W6800X Duos or a staggering $11,600 on two W6900X modules.

The Mac Pro has in any other case gone untouched with this replace, and it will not be shocking if that is the one {hardware} refresh for Apple’s professional tower in 2021. There are rumors of Apple giving the Intel-based Mac Pro one final hurrah with an Ice Lake Xeon replace, however that would not occur till 2022. It may not occur in any respect when there’s additionally discuss of a 40-core Apple Silicon mannequin that very same 12 months. It’s secure to say that you’re going to need to strongly think about a W6000-equipped Mac Pro should you completely depend upon high-end x86 apps or simply want the type of macOS efficiency that solely the Pro can presently ship.