KEY POINTS:
Fancy a Mac that delivers nearly twice the grunt of its predecessor?
Apple claims that its brand-spanking Mac Pro, with eight processor cores and new system architecture will deliver.
Announced today, the flagship Mac Pro desktop combines a pair of Intel's 45-nanometre Quad-Core Xeon processors running at 3.2 GHz and can tuck away up to four terabyte of internal data.
Each processor is backed up by 12 MB of Level 2 cache, and the new high-bandwidth architecture runs dual-independent 1600 MHz frontside busses with up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 RAM.
Apple claims that this impressive spec equates to a 61 per cent increase in memory throughput.
Standard graphics performance is provided by ATI's Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of VRAM, but a PCI Express 2.0 slot is capable of doubling the video bandwidth over the previous generation Pro model and will happily run graphics cards like the 1.5GB Nvidia Quadro FX5600. There is support for up to four graphics cards, so each Pro can drive up to eight displays at once.
There is direct attachment, cable-free installation for 1TB SATA drives, with support for a pair of SuperDrives (CD/DVD writers).
Optional SAS drives running at up to 15000rpm can deliver up to 250MB per second I/O in a RAID 5 set-up.
