The Mac Pro Upgrades

Apple's desktop workstation, the Mac Pro, now features up to 12 CPU cores for what Apple says is a 50 percent performance improvement on its predecessor. "In terms of the processor, we're adding Intel's latest generation Xeon technology, the Westmere generation of products," says David Moody, Apple vice president of worldwide Mac hardware marketing, referring to the Intel code name for the processor line. The new chips feature a 32-nanometer process that can fit up to six cores on a single die.

The new Mac Pro features a pair of either quad-core or six-core Intel Xeon processors, with up to a 12MB Level 3 (L3) cache and speeds ranging from 2.66GHz to 3.33GHz. "The combination of the cache and the integrated memory controller provides outstanding memory band­width and improved memory latency," Moody told Macworld. The new Mac Pro also features Turbo Boost, which allows the system to dynamically boost CPU speeds up to 3.6GHz, and Hyper-Threading, which allows the system to create up to 24 virtual cores. A first for the Mac Pro line, customers can slip a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD) into one or all four of the drive bays. By filling all four drive bays with SSDs, users can create a striped RAID. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card with 1GB ofGDDR5 memory is now Custom Rig Apple says that there are 1.3 billion possible configurations of the Mac Pro.