AMD has announced the chipmaker's new, high-performance Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo workstation-class graphics cards that will be powering Apple's brand-new Mac Pro, which drops this Fall.

(Image credit: Apple)

The latest Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cater to the needs of professionals who constantly interact with demanding workloads, such as rendering, video editing in 8K resolution, high-end 3D content creation, etcetera, just to name a few. The pair of graphics cards continue to use AMD's second-generation Vega architecture. They employ a variant of the 7nm Vega 20 silicon that first debuted on the Radeon Instinct MI50, Instinct MI60, and later made its way into the Radeon VII.

Model Architecture (GPU) Compute Units Stream Processors FP16 Performance FP32 Performance Peak Engine Clock Memory Capacity Memory Bus Memory Bandwidth Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GCN 5.1 (Vega 20 x 2) 128 8192 56.8 TFLOPS 28.4 TFLOPS 1700 MHz 64GB HBM2 4096-bit 1 TB/s Radeon Instinct MI60 GCN 5.1 (Vega 20) 64 4096 29.49 TFLOPS 14.75 TFLOPS 1800 MHz 32GB HBM2 4095-bit 1 TB/s Radeon Pro Vega II GCN 5.1 (Vega 20) 64 4096 28.4 TFLOPS 14.2 TFLOPS 1700 MHz 32GB HBM2 4096-bit 1 TB/s Radeon Instinct MI50 GCN 5.1 (Vega 20) 60 3840 26.82 TFLOPS 13.41 TFLOPS 1746 MHz 16 HBM2 4096-bit 1 TB/s Radeon VII GCN 5.1 (Vega 20) 60 3840 26.88 TFLOPS 13.44 TFLOPS 1750 GHz 16GB HBM2 4096-bit 1 TB/s

The Radeon Pro Vega II arrives with 64 Compute Units, which is equivalent to 4,096 Stream Processors. The graphics card features a 1.7 GHz peak engine clock and delivers up to 14.2 TFLOPs of FP32 performance. AMD has endowed the Radeon Pro Vega II with 32GB of HBM2 memory across a 4,096-bit memory bus to pump out a memory bandwidth up to 1 TB/s.

AMD also offers the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo for consumers who need even more firepower. As its name implies, this monster is the product of combining two Vega 20 die onboard the same PCB. As a result, the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo comes with 128 Compute Units and 8,192 Stream Processors. It still runs with a 1.7 GHz peak engine clock but offer twice as much FP32 performance. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo retains the 4,096-bit memory interface and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. However, it's decked out with 64GB of HBM2 memory.

As shown in the Mac Pro's diagram, AMD made a custom Radeon Pro Vega II Duo for Apple that doesn't rely on any external PCIe power connectors. The graphics card pulls its power entirely from a standard PCIe x16 slot, which is capable of 75W, and Apple's new propiertary PCIe connector that can supply up to 475W. Both the Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo feature four ThunderBolt 3 ports and one HDMI 2.0 port for connecting displays.

Apple has introduced its proprietary Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX Module) along with its upcoming Mac Pro. The MPX module allows to you pair up to two Radeon Pro Vega II or Radeon Pro Vega II Duo inside the same machine. Therefore, you can potentially own a graphics processing beast with a combined 56.8 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 128GB of HBM2 memory, which is pretty insane. The graphics cards communicate with each other through AMD's Infinity Fabric Link connection for an aggregate bandwidth up to 84 GB/s per direction.

AMD hasn't revealed the availability or pricing for the Radeon Pro Vega II and Radeon Pro Vega II Duo. Given the nature of the 7nm Vega 20 graphics cards and the segment they are competing in, we expect them to cost a small fortune.