Apple and Blackmagic designed this eGPU to turbocharge MacBook Pros

By Kevin Lee

Apple announced external GPU support for Macs at WWDC 2017, and now the company teamed up with the cinema company Blackmagic to develop a new eGPU designed specifically for the new MacBook Pros announced today.

Simply named the Blackmagic eGPU, this external graphics card enclosure is powered by a AMD Radeon Pro 580 featuring 8GB of video memory, 256-bit memory bandwidth and 36 discrete compute units for a total of 5.5 teraflops of processing power.

According to Apple, the Blackmagic eGPU will deliver 2.8 times faster graphics performance on the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 8 times faster on the 13-inch model. In some DaVinci Resolve 15 performance charts from ZDNet, we can also see the Blackmagic eGPU adds a seven-fold performance boost to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, while the 15-inch MacBook Pro gets a two or three times improvement.

All-in-one design

The Blackmagic eGPU also acts as a Thunderbolt docking station. So, connecting your MacBook Pro to this graphics accelerator will grant access to four USB 3.1 Type-A ports, two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports and one HDMI. The enclosure also provides up to 85W to the connected laptop over Thunderbolt 3.

Unlike most external GPU boxes, the Blackmagic …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components