Although not discussed during the WWDC keynote and not mentioned in Apple’s published press materials for the show, the venerable Mac Pro got a minor refresh on Monday. A 12-core configuration is now standard.
The Mac Pro’s standard configuration now includes two 2.4 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5645 processors, replacing the quad-core E5620 processors it had previously. Speed hasn’t increased, and they still sport 12MB of L3 cache per processor. The quad-core configuration now features a 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W3565 processor, replacing the W3530 processor in the previous configuration.
Connections remain identical – four FireWire 800 ports, five USB 2.0 ports, front panel headphone minijack and internal speaker, optical digital audio input and output TOSLINK ports, analog stereo line-level input and output minijacks, and multichannel audio support through Mini DisplayPort.
Graphics on the refreshed Mac Pro are the same – ATI Radeon HD 5770 or 5870 cards are standard issue. Memory is a bit faster on the dual processor system – 1333 MHz DDR3 instead of 1066 MHz DDR 3.
WTF Apple!
Was this the update you had in mind when you answered “Nope” to Dan Benjamin’s question on whether the Mac Pro was dead?
Because this isn’t much better. I’m not dropping three large on nearly three-year old tech in a ten-year old case.
If I’de have made those comments I’de now know how Larry Jordan felt… Apple really needs to explain this shambles.
I’m a bit more curious why Apple hasn’t yet equipped the Pro with Thunderbolt than I am with wailing about why it isn’t in a shiny new box.
If I needed a new tower for my work, I’d buy one.
There is no Xeon chipset with Thunderbolt and USB 3. The alternative is a crossover cable, as Asus has done on some machines, but it’s an inelegant, frankly ugly solution – not what we expect from Apple. Ivy Bridge (I hope I’m getting my chipset names correct) Xeon E5s should be released by Intel in the Fall or so, making the release of a Mac Pro based on them in the Spring or early Summer a reasonable timetable.
I’m definitely not buying this year’s Mac Pro, but I may need to upgrade (from an Early 2008 iMac I’m pushing to its limits with an external display and USB peripherals) before next year’s is out. Waiting a whole year is going to be painful…
While the Thunderbolt is hard, USB3 is trivial.
The crossover cable Asus has can’t work on the Mac Pro because it has no internal GPU. What you need to get Thunderbolt on the Mac Pro, and that remains the case even with whatever update you’d get. basically you need to take the GPU card and add a Thunderbolt chip to it. The GPU has more than enough pcie lanes going to it to add some pcie into the outgoing displayport.
Yeah. Not trivial. I found myself considering the Retina Macbook Pro as a stopgap… Still completely undecided.