The new Mac Pro is here

Apple’s eagerly awaited Mac Pros have arrived, available for order since yesterday.

Since its presentation in the summer, there has been a lot of discussion about both the internal and external design, due to the fact that it is a completely different model from the previous generation.

First, it is designed around what the company named as a “unified thermal core” (three backplanes that connect to one heat sink), in an aluminum enclosure that is 25cm tall and one-eighth the volume of the old Mac Pros.

Although there are different configurations (4, 6, 8 or 12 cores), all of them have the latest generation Intel Xeon processors working with “Turbo Boost” speeds that accelerate up to 3.9 GHz.

Another factor favoring the performance of the new workstations are the two AMD FIrePro GPUs. Apple has run some tests and claims that they can deliver up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous towers. (These tests were conducted with 12-core, 2.7 GHz prototypes, 1TB of flash storage and the AMD FirePro700s; as well as 12-core, 3.06 GHz units with 512 GB SSD and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 cards).

PCIe flash storage also offers sequential read speeds up to 10 times faster than conventional hard drives, and DDR3 ECC memory generates bandwidth of up to 60 GBps that would allow editors to work at full 4K resolution even while rendering background effects (according to Apple).

In addition, it contains six Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) ports, with expansion capability to connect up to 36 high-performance peripherals, including the latest 4K displays on the market.

The price of the new Mac Pro depends a lot on the chosen configuration, but for $2,999 you can count on a 3.7 GHz quad-core processor, AMD FirePro D300 GPUs (with 2GB of VRAM each), 12 GB of memory and 256 GB of PCIe flash storage.

If you want more information about the available models you can consult the official Apple website or read the article we published in summer.