Apple announces new Mac Pros, up to 12 cores

This morning, Apple announced an impending update to its Mac Pro line. Rumors were swirling in the past few weeks that the Mac Pros—which had not seen an update for over 500 days until today—were getting long in the tooth and would see an update soon.

The new Mac Pros sport Intel’s Xeon (“Nehalem”) processors with a variety of configurations. The extreme end is, obviously, the most gaudy one: Apple is offering users the options to slap two CPUs, meaning up to 12 cores of processing power, into the towers for a starting entry price of $4,999. Twelve. These machines use Intel’s “Westmere” processor series, which is the codename for the 32-nm processor chips. So, of the many options available, here are some of the possible configurations: 6-core Mac Pro at 3.33GHz, an 8-core system at 2.4GHz, or a 12-core system at up to 2.93GHz.

The new Mac Pros also sport a behemoth GPU, the ATI Radeon HD 5770, with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. An available upgrade option is the ATI Radeon HD 5870, which has a wider memory bus than the 5770, thus making it faster than the 5770. Also new to the Mac Pro is the option to fill the four drive bays with four 512GB SSDs, or any combination of SSDs and HDDs; at your own cost, of course. Additionally, standard are two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI port.

So, the available base models are:

• $2499, one 2.8 GHz Quad-Core, 3GB RAM, 1TB HDD
• $3499, two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core, 6GB RAM, 1TB HDD

But, of course, there is a lot of customization to be done.

All the new Mac Pros ship in August.

Via [Apple]