Apple’s new Mac Pro sports a stainless-steel space frame. For 360-degree access to the entire system, the aluminium design can be lifted off as well. (Image: Apple Newsroom)Apple unveiled its new Mac Pro along with a new 6K resolution Pro Display XDR at its ongoing Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California. The Mac Pro was long due for an upgrade and Apple has completely redesigned its desktop for professionals with a new look and powerful specifications.
Among the most notable features of the redesigned Mac Pro are Xeon processors up to 28 cores, 1.5TB memory system capacity, and eight PCIe expansion slots. The new Mac Pro will be available to order in the fall this year. The starting price is $5,999.
Apple Mac Pro: Features and specifications
Apple’s new Mac Pro sports a stainless-steel space frame. For 360-degree access to the entire system, the aluminium design can be lifted off as well. The lattice pattern is said to enable a quiet operation and help with maximising the airflow, though the design was being compared to a cheese grater on Twitter. An optimised version of Mac Pro for rack deployment will also be available later this year.
In addition, Apple also introduced its new accelerator card Afterburner, which is capable of offering playback for three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously. The Mac Pro ships with 56 teraflops of graphics performance and Blackmagic Design, which enables full CPU and multi-GPU accelerated 8K real-time editing, effects and colour correction in ProRes 4444.
Apple Mac Pro is powered by 28-core Xeon processors coupled with 64 PCI Express lanes. The device supports six HDX cards and 12 physical DIMM slots, thus allowing for 1.5TB of memory. There are eight PCI Express expansion slots, instead of four on the previous-generation Mac Pro tower.
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Radeon Pro 580X also comes as a graphics option for Mac Pro, though the initial variants will be available with Radeon Pro Vega II, which is said feature up to 14 teraflops of compute performance and 32GB memory with 1TB/s memory bandwidth. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo has also been introduced in the Mac Pro, which come with 64GB memory and provides 28 teraflops of graphics performance. Mac Pro can support two MPX Modules.
Apple Pro Display XDR: Features and specifications
Apple Pro Display XDR features a 32-inch LCD Retina 6K panel with a resolution of 6016 x 3384 pixels. The screen has a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. It sports a P3 wide colour gamut and true 10-bit colour with support for over a billion colours. Pro Display XDR offers up to 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits of peak brightness.
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It sports an aluminium lattice pattern for better heat management. The display gets an anti-reflective coating as well and there is a new matte option called nano-texture for low reflectivity and less glare. In terms of design, the Pro Display XDR sports edge-to-edge glass enclosed in aluminium and it offers both tilt and height adjustments. In portrait mode, it can also be rotated.
Pro Display XDR users can also interchange VESA mount adapter with the Pro Stand. The Pro Display XDR can be connected to the Mac line-up using a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Those interested will be able to order the Pro Display XDR starting at $4,999, the Pro Stand and the VESA Mount Adapter starting this fall.
