Apple finally announced the long rumored new Mac Pros which will be available in few weeks in 4, 6, 8 and 12-core versions. Base configuration is still a single chip Quad-Core, speed bumped to 2.8GHz and the new 6-core Xeon “Westmere” is also available as a singe chip configuration at up to 3.33GHz, peaking at 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost mode.
The dual chip 8-Core middle-class-model – usually the best for Pro Tools – also gained more speed, now clocking 2.4GHz. The dual chip 12-Core model is available as BTO (Built To Order) and goes up to whopping 2.93Hz. All models support Hyper-Threading to create double amount of virtual cores, i.e. applications see the 12-Core Mac as 24-Core silicon.
The Mac Pro now comes with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 SDRAM and the even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory is also an option. Both display cards support three displays out of the box with 2 Mini DisplayPorts and 1 dual-link DVI. Maximum internal storage is now 8TB with 4 x 2TB drives and SSD is now also an option for the ultimate speed an reliability.
18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) is standard and the case still has place for a second optical drive. The processor-integrated memory controller supports up to 32GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM at either 1066MHz or 1333MHz. Connectivity has remained the same with with four PCI Express 2.0 slots (dual slot for display card), five USB 2.0 ports, four FireWire 800 ports, AirPort Extreme 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR.
Stay tuned for availability and Pro Tools compatibility info, you’ll find both here sooner than later.
