Apple has upgraded the Mac Pro line: The whole range now comes with Intel 45nm eight core processors as standard at up to 3.2Ghz (although your can "downgrade" to a single quad core). This spoiler comes in the middle of CES, which Apple famously disrupted last year, slowing the fire-hose of news to a trickle with its announcement of the iPhone.
Apple claims that the new 45nm quad-core Intel Xeon processors give up to double the performance of the previous chips. The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT comes as standard, and a PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot will let you add more graphics power for an Al Gore-like panoramic monitor setup. I'll quote from the press release here:
Yes. Eight. In addition, four SATA slots will accommodate 4 terabytes of storage. Following tradition, I specced out the highest end model available (I left out the modem but included 32 gigs of RAM). The price? $21,350. This is obviously aimed at high-end users – animation and video FX houses – but even the standard configuration smokes: Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon chips, 2GB RAM (you'll be wanting to buy extra from a third party given Apple's famous high markups on RAM), the Radeon card mentioned above, a 320GB hard drive and a 16x SuperDrive.
This is a pretty big bump to the pro line, something which would normally warrant an event and a speech from Steve Jobs. The fact that this slipped out as a mere press release shows that Apple has to break out regular upgrades regularly now it is using the same Intel chips as the rest of the PC market. It also reminds us that Jobsnote speeches are now reserved for new products. With this out of the way, expect something big at Macworld next week.
One more thing. As you can see from the publicity shot above, the sales slogan references The Frank Zappa Song Bobby Brown. Please don't confuse this Tower of Power with the oversized sexual toy mentioned by Zappa in the song.
Product page [Apple]
Press release [Apple]
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