It was acknowledged by Apple few months ago but it is only today that the company has finally unveiled the brand new Mac Pro workstation. A clear departure from previous iteration which was first introduced in 2013, the new model moved on from the cylindrical design of its predecessor and back to the tower form factor.
Within its removable aluminium housing which is supported by the stainless steel space frame is a dual-sided motherboard that Apple has designed to allow easier access to individual components. The lattice pattern on its housing together with three fans on the front side of the machine and a blower help cool down the machine which comes with some serious hardware options.
Customer can opt to fit the new Mac Pro with up to 28-core 56-threads Intel Xeon W processor alongside up to 1.5TB DDR4-2933 ECC memory. It also can be fitted with up to two 2TB solid state drives which are encrypted by Apple’s own T2 security chip.
Interesting enough, Apple has come out with its own graphics form factor called MPX Module in order to integrate Thunderbolt 3 ports directly to the graphics card and provide it with additional power headroom. In total, the new Mac Pro is able to support up to two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo modules which are equivalent to four GPUs with a total processing power of 56 TFLOPS.
Apple has also unveiled a dedicated accelerator card called Afterburner for the machine which allows users to handle multiple 8K or 4K ProRes RAW streams in real time without the need of proxy workflows. Altogether, the new Mac Pro has eight PCI Express slots that users can take advantage alongside four Thunderbolt 3, two USB 3,and two 10Gb Ethernet ports.
Not enough with that, the new Mac Pro apparently comes with its own speaker although users can also plug in their own audio equipment via its 3.5mm audio port. Equipped with a 1400W power supply, users can also obtained the machine with optional wheels so that it can moved easily from one workspace to another.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl4Hg23RQHQ
Available later this year, the new Mac Pro has a starting price of USD 5,999 (about RM 25,059) which seems rather hefty but then again, we are talking about professional-grade workstations right here. We’ll keep you posted once we hear more from Apple regarding its availability in Malaysia.
(Source: Apple.)
