Apple has drastically altered the shape of its high-end Mac Pro workstation, in addition to bumping up the specs possible for the computer. For starters, the new cylindrical design is considerably smaller than previous Mac Pros, measuring just under 10 inches (25cm) high and 6.6-inches in diameter (17cm).
The design, as stylish and compact as it is, allows for a single-fan design when it comes to cooling the new Mac Pro. The computer is build around a “unified thermal core”, where air is drawn upward from the base of the machine by a single fan that Apple says is “astonishingly quiet”.
In terms of hardware, Apple will somehow cram up to 12 cores of Xeon CPU into a space 1/8th the volume of the last Mac Pro design. Along with that will be 1866MHz RAM, offering up to double the bandwidth on past models, and PCI-e flash storage to put a little extra speed into the machine. Capacities of the drive have not been announced but graphics duties will be taken care of by dual-AMD FirePro GPUs that almost triple the graphics performance of current Mac Pros. That’s 7 teraflops of graphics processing compared to the 2.7 teraflops available now. The usual range of ports, from ethernet to Thunderbolt 2, HDMI and USB 3, will be present and accounted for and the Mac Pro’s case will feature a motion sensor that lights up the ports for easy socketing in the dark.
The new Mac Pro is expected to launch in the US later this year, with no details on pricing or international availability floating about just yet.
Source: Ars Technica