Apple showed off the new Mac Pro on Tuesday. The 9.9-inch tall Mac Pro features Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores, dual workstation-class GPUs, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, PCIe-based flash storage and ECC memory. Prices start from $2,999, and the devices will be available in December.

Philip Schiller (Senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing, Apple): The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been reimagined and there has never been anything like it. 

The new Mac Pro is architected around a unified thermal core, that allows the system to efficiently share thermal capacity across all the processors, says Apple. 

A look at the new Mac Pro features:

1. The new Mac Pro features 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz.
2. It also has two workstation-class AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 12GB of video memory provide up to seven teraflops of compute power and up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro. 
3. OpenGL and OpenCL are optimized in OS X Mavericks to leverage the full computing power of the Mac Pro CPU and dual GPUs.
4. The new Mac Pro features PCIe-based flash storage that delivers sequential read speeds up to 1.2GBps and is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives.
5. ECC DDR3 running at 1866 MHz, with a four-channel memory controller, gives the new Mac Pro up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth, twice that of the previous generation Mac Pro. 
6. The new Mac Pro features six Thunderbolt 2 ports, each with up to 20Gbps of bandwidth per device. Thunderbolt 2 ports support up to six daisy-chained devices each, giving users the ability to connect up to 36 peripherals—from external storage devices, to multiple PCI expansion chassis, to audio and video breakout boxes.
7. Thunderbolt 2 uses existing copper or optical Thunderbolt cables and is backward compatible with existing Thunderbolt peripherals and cables.  
8. Mac Pro uses up to 70 percent less energy than the previous generation, is constructed with 79 percent less aluminum and uses 80 percent less packaging material than the current Mac Pro. Mac Pro contains no brominated flame retardants, and is PVC-free.

The new Mac Pro will be available in December. The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor (with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz), dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2,999. The model with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor (also with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz), dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starts at $3,999.

Configure-to-order options include 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage. 

“It looks like a garbage can!” was among the reactions the Cupertino giant got, when it first unveiled the machines in June. Apple fanatics in Japan went a step further, and launched a garbage can that looked like the Mac Pro, which became an instant Internet hit.

[Image courtesy: Apple]

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