Still As Life

The Apple homepage has just recently been updated to advertise a new line of Mac Pro computers released yesterday that are described as a "Tower of 8-core power". According to the specs listed in the press release, this statement is perfectly accurate.

The standard 8-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $2,799 (US), includes:

• two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
• 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• 16x SuperDrive™ with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; and
• ships with Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

In addition to the standard configuration, the Mac Pro offers numerous build-to-order options including: one 2.8 GHz, two 3.0 GHz, or two 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors; up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 fully-buffered ECC memory; up to four 1TB Serial ATA hard drives running at 7200 rpm or up to four 300GB SAS drives running at 15000 rpm; Mac Pro RAID card; up to two 16x SuperDrives with double-layer support; NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics cards; AirPort Extreme 802.11n; Apple USB Modem; Apple wireless Aluminum Keyboard; Apple wireless Mighty Mouse; and Mac OS X Server Leopard. Complete build-to-order options and pricing are available at www.apple.com/macpro.

With capabilities of running 32gb of RAM along with 8 3.2ghz Xeon cores, they really aren't kidding when they say these are the fastest Mac's ever made. Previously they couldn't claim this as in some scenario's, the previous G5 PowerPC's still outperformed the new Mac Pro's. This was even shown in the benchmarks on the Apple website. I can't find this anymore to link to it as it appears the performance charts have been replaced with new ones showing the power comparison of the new 8 core beasts. Though one does wonder why they are in some cases compared to the previous model with 4 cores and some compared to the G5's.

I suspect this has come around in part due to the release of 16 new Intel CPU's to the Penryn family of processors that were officially announced on the 7th of January, two days ago.

It wouldn't surprise me if the new Mac Pro's are leading the way for a new line of Macbook's as well. I have heard rumours of an "Apple Portable" but I don't know if there is anything to that or not.

My logic says though that it was only recently that a new line of iMac's were released, now there is a new line of Mac Pro's. That only leaves Mac Mini's and Macbook's/Macbook Pro's. This is purely speculation on my part though.

Labels: hardware, technology