| Eight-core Mac Pro, Xserve jump Expo gun |
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| Written by Stephen Withers | |
| Wednesday, 09 January 2008 | |
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The new Mac Pro also features dual 1600MHz front side buses supporting up to 32G of 800MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM. "The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With 3.2GHz eight-core Xeon processing, a 1600MHz front side bus and 800MHz memory, the new Mac Pro uses the fastest Intel Xeon architecture on the market." Apple claims the new models are up to twice as fast as 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro when running applications such as Maya, modo and Logic Pro. The standard graphics card is the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, but cards such as the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT and Quadro FX 5600 are also supported. With two PCI Express and two PCI Express 2.0 slots, up to four graphics cards can be installed. According to Apple officials, this allows the simultaneous use of up to eight 30in displays for advanced visualisation or large display walls. As for storage, the $US2799/$A3999 standard build with dual 2.8GHz CPUs has a 320G 7200rpm SATA drive plus a 16x SuperDrive DVD burner. Options include up to four 1T SATA drives or up to four 300G 15,000rpm SAS drives, a RAID card, and a second SuperDrive. The Mac Pro now includes the aluminium keyboard as standard. The Xserve has been updated with 3.0GHz quad-core Xeon processors, faster front side buses and memory, and two PCI Express 2.0 slots. The $US2999/$A4499 base model provides a single 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon, 2G of DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM, an 80G SATA drive, dual Gigabit Ethernet, built-in graphics controller, plus two FireWire 800 and three USB 2.0 ports - one of which is now on the front panel. Options include dual 2.8 or 3.0GHz Xeon CPUs, 80G and 1T SATA drives, 73G and 300G 15,000rpm SAS drives, RAID card, Gigabit Ethernet, 4Gbit Fibre Channel card, U320 SCSI card, and a redundant power supply. THe RAID card includes a backup battery to protect cached data for up to 72 hours. "With the latest Intel processors and no client access licenses, Xserve offers unbeatable server performance and value for under $US3000," said Schiller. "Xserve's power, storage and Leopard Server make it ideal for supporting Mac clients and mixed platform workgroups."
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