Apple unleashes 8-core Mac Pro monster

Adam Turner
Wednesday, 04 April 2007 19:50

Your IT - Home IT

With Leopard ready to pounce, Apple has harnessed the processing power of eight cores in its new dual quad-core Mac Pro workstation.

The Mac Pro is available with two Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Clovertown" processors running at 3.0GHz. Also available is a quad-core Mac Pro featuring two Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors running at 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3.0GHz.

The 8-core Mac Pro features 8MB of L2 cache per processor (16MB total; each pair of cores shares 4MB), 128-bit SSE3 vector engine, 64-bit data paths and registers plus 1.33GHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses. It also supports up to 16GB RAM and up to 3TB of internal storage.

The 8-core Mac Pro comes as Apple prepares to unveil Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Apple is believed to be planning to release Leopard in June, probably at its Worldwide Developers Conference, although there are rumours of delays pushing the release date back several months.

The latest Mac Pros also come as Adobe prepares to shop the long awaited Creative Suite 3, featuring Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects all rewritten for Intel-based Macs.

Mac Pro pricing starts at US$2499, but add another $1498 for the 8-core model.