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New Mac Pro is eight-cored beast

Claims it is twice as fast
Wednesday, 9 January 2008, 14:36

TOYMAKER Steve Jobs has been getting his Christmas elves to build him a new Mac Pro which has more processor cores than you can poke a stick at.

The new Mac Pro comes with not two, or four processors, but a pair of Intel's 45 nanometre Quad-Core Xeons all plumbed neatly together and supported by four terabytes of disk space.

It seems that Jobs has been taking the INQ comments to heart about Apple turning into an entertainment gadget maker to heart. But bigger fish than us have been saying that Apple has been disappearing from producing anything cutting edge for a while.

According to the press release, each processor is backed up by 12 MB of Level 2 cache, and the new high-bandwidth architecture runs dual-independent 1600MHz frontside busses with up to 32GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM.

Apple claims that this spec equates to a 61 per cent increase in memory throughput.

Graphics on the beast come from ATI's Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of VRAM. But there is support for up to four graphics cards so the Pro can run eight displays at once.

Needless to say it is very pretty. It will set you back $2700 in the US, but you will have to find your own monitor.

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Comments
Great Vista Machine

With those specs it should be able to run vista pretty nice LOL

posted by : Pete, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
ummm

Except that the 8core version starts at $2,799 USD.

posted by : dbzeag, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
Nvidia 8800GTX

Very nice box, but it's strange they don't support this gfx card, or is there some specific reason? Seems the graphics hardware is lacking options historically... Current mac pro models have been off my chart of acceptable computers due to the old graphics cards.

posted by : jaw, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
At last an answer to my problems

I cant wait to rush out and buy one, no really I'm not joking here. Now if can someone tell me what to do with it exactly.................

posted by : Thomas Doubting , 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
$2700, $27000, whatever

Us rich Americans think nothing of blowing $27K on a PC, of course, but the article actually quotes a retail price of 2,799. Ok, fine, I'll actually be building myself a $700 Nehalem PC when it comes out (with Ubuntu to shave the Vista tax). That should replace my old POS 32-bit non-VT Prescott nicely. But the Macs do certainly sound nice.

posted by : Sean Ryan, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
Radeon 2600XT???

Isn't that a bit like equipping a Formula-1 car with the wheels off a horse cart? Still, unless you install XP/Vista there won't be any games to make full use of all that anyway...

posted by : Photoboy, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
Apple's latest Toy

And the top spec one will cost only £16k ($30k)

posted by : Ron Hughes, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
That's Less than

I paid for a P133 system with 16Mb of memory some 9 or 10 years ago. Dammit!

posted by : Efros, 09 January 2008Complain about this comment
yikes

As if the 2600XT didn't feel inadequate enough...

posted by : wumberpeb, 10 January 2008Complain about this comment
Non mac dual quad...

lol. i have a dual 45nm quad PC (not apple). the innards can be got for less, and aren't "branded" by the fruity brigade ;)

posted by : m.oreilly, 10 January 2008Complain about this comment
The new Mac Pro...

...comes with not two, or four processors, but a pair Seriously though, all those processing cores and a Radeon HD 2600 XT?

posted by : jbo5112, 10 January 2008Complain about this comment
Amused

I loved reading that, the more I read on the more I smiled... knowing, just knowing the pot hole of a graphics card was soon to come up and let the system down. If Apple and other OS's arn't going to even 'try' and entice gamers with high spec cards then how are they going to move into that segment! Multimedia includes games as well!

posted by : Richard Alpagot, 10 January 2008Complain about this comment
Thats Nothing

My aging Commodore 64 could beat that any day ha ha ha

posted by : Dave C, 11 January 2008Complain about this comment
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