Apple Launching Its Most Powerful Mac Ever in August

Apple has announced that a new range of Mac Pro workstations with up to 12 processing cores and up to 50 percent greater performance than the previous generation is scheduled to arrive this August, in a move that will finalize the company’s plans of upgrading the desktop line of Macs for 2010.

“Featuring the latest quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors, all-new ATI graphics and the option for up to four 512GB solid state drives (SSD), the new Mac Pro continues to deliver amazing performance and expandability for the most demanding consumers and professionals,” Apple announced in a press release yesterday.

“The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and configurable Mac we’ve ever made,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With up to 12 cores, the new Mac Pro outperforms our previous top-of-the-line system by up to 50 percent, and with over a billion possible configurations, our customers can create exactly the system they want.”

Apple’s upcoming Mac Pros leverage multi-core technology to deliver the fastest computing power ever seen on a Mac, the company said. The new Pros rely on next generation quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds up to 3.33 GHz which use a single die design so that each core can share up to 12MB L3 cache to improve efficiency while increasing processing speed, the company explained yesterday. The systems also feature an integrated memory controller for faster memory bandwidth and reduced memory latency, Turbo Boost to dynamically boost processor speeds up to 3.6 GHz, and Hyper-Threading to create up to 24 virtual cores.

Just as important is the graphics solution which has been replaced by the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory. Configure-to-order options allow customers to swap it for the even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory. Configure-to-order options for processors include: one 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3565 processor for the quad-core Mac Pro; one 3.33 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon W3680 processor for the quad-core Mac Pro; two 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 processors (12-cores) for the 8-core Mac Pro; two 2.93 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5670 processors (12-cores) for the 8-core Mac Pro. A first for the Mac Pro line, a 512GB solid state drive (SSD) can be added to the mix for faster read and write performance. This build-to-order option also ups the price a bit, of course.

The new Mac Pros will ship with an additional Mini DisplayPort (which allows customers to connect two LED Cinema Displays without an additional graphics card or adapter) and one dual-link DVI port for support of DVI-based displays. Apple’s new Magic Trackpad is also supported by the new Mac Pros. Visit Apple here for more information on the upcoming new Macs.