AppleInsider Staff
In a rare move, Apple offered a sneak preview of a "Mac unlike any we've ever made," sporting a new, smaller cylindrical design powerful enough to drive three 4K-resolution displays.
"Can't innovate anymore, my ass," Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller quipped after showing off a video of the new hardware, prompting loud cheers from the Worldwide Developers Conference. The new machine will be assembled in America.
The professional-grade machine will arrive later this year with next-generation Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores. It will feature the fastest ECC memory ever seen in a Mac with 60 GBps bandwidth.
The desktop also features dual workstation GPUs powered by AMD FirePro. That will allow up to 2 and a half times faster than the graphics of the last generation, capable of driving three 4K resolution displays on the new high-end machine.
Internal storage will be PCIe flash, with 1.25GBps reads, 1.0GBps writes. The system will also feature Thunderbolt 2 support with 20 Gbps throughput, 6 devices per port, and backward compatible with Thunderbolt 1.
The new Mac Pro is one-eighth the volume of the previous generation. Giving it easy portability, the entire top of the new Pro is a handle, while ports are all organized on the back.
Malcolm Owen
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311 Comments
It's a BUTT PLUG !!!!
Yeah baby!
This is cool!
THOSE SPECS. That case... Uhm... Yes... That case. I will say, they pretty much kicked everyone's ideas of what the new one will look like right out the door. A single central cooling unit inside a cylinder is actually quite brilliant. But eww, that case.
Outside of software (iOS or OS X), it's unusual for Apple to announce hardware and then say "coming later".
I think they're trying to appease professionals instead of leaving them out in the cold at WWDC and announcing it later. I want to see the Pixar demo tomorrow running in this machine.