Apple, the Californian computer company whose sleek designs have taken the arts and media industries by storm since their co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the company to become its CEO, have just announced their fastest-ever Mac.
The new Mac Pro is capable of housing two of Intel’s Westmere 32nm processors, which means that the top-spec system boasts 12 cores, each running at a whopping 2.93GHz, with each CPU having 12MB of Level 3 cache. The net result of this, Apple say, is an increase in power over the previous top-end Mac Pro, by a factor of 1.5.
New models in the Mac Pro range also be ship with the latest ATI graphics cards: the 5XXX series. The fastest of these, the HD5870, is not only significantly faster than the GPU previously available (up to five times faster than before, according to Apple) — it also features three outputs (one dual-link DVI out and two Mini DisplayPort outputs), so you can run three monitors simultaneously. Furthermore, because Mac Pros can house two cards, you can really go for the ‘James Bond villain’ look by spanning your Mac’s display across an almost unnecessary six screens!
Hard-disk capacity has also been significantly increased, as the latest incarnation of the Mac Pro has four internal 3.5-inch drive bays. If sheer storage space floats your boat, then you can opt for four 2TB SATA hard drives, for a total of 8TB. Alternatively, if disk speed is necessary for your work (as it may well be, especially if you use large streaming sample libraries), you can swap out some of those clunky old mechanical drives for some turbo-fast solid-state models, the largest of which has a capacity of half a terabyte. A Mac Pro RAID card allows you to increase performance even further: the RAID 0 option afforded by this card means that data span multiple hard drives, using one to read and one to write (for example) simultaneously. RAID options 1 and 5 provide protection against drive failure (by mirroring your data on multiple drives), while RAID 0+1 is a best-of-both-worlds solution, which (at the expense of considerable hard-disk capacity) increases both disk performance and data safety.
And continuing in the spirit of “more is better”, the newest Mac Pros also have space for two optical drives, which Apple handily point out means that you can burn two DVDs at once — indeed, two dual-layer DVDs at a time, with two of Apple’s 18X SuperDrives installed, which should make the process of backing up your data significantly faster.
For more detailed specifications, and to find out where you can buy one of these 12-core behemoths, head on over to the Apple web site.
