How formidable? To find out, we'll pit two middle-of-the-road Mac Pro models against one another: a 2.66GHz quad-core Rev A model and the new 3.0GHz octo-core Rev B model. The Mac Pro looks formidable on paper, with room for up to 4TB of storage, 32GB of RAM, and eight processor cores spread across two very fast CPUs.
The southbridge handles just about everything else, including storage, Ethernet, USB, FireWire, and audio. The northbridge and southbridge (I/O controller) talk over x4 PCIe and x4 ESI links. Both of the PCIe 2.0 slots are connected directly to the northbridge as well, as are the FB-DIMMs. The system controller-or northbridge-in the diagram above interfaces with the Xeon 5400-series CPUs over the 1600MHz frontside bus. The Xeon 5472 in the 3.0GHz Mac Pro being reviewed has a TDP of 80W. 8MB), support for SSE-4 vector operations, and some virtualization improvements.ĭespite the increase in clock speed and other performance improvements, the thermal design power has remained the same across the board.
#MAC PRO 5.1 6 CORE 3.4 CPU SERIES#
The biggest differences between the 5400 series Xeons and their predecessors have to do with the amount of L2 cache (12MB vs. The Harpertown CPUs in the Mac Pro are the first Xeon processors to make the transition to Penryn, Intel's family of processors manufactured with the company's 45nm process. Just in time for Macworld, Apple refreshed the Mac Pro line to offer quad-core CPUs across the board, using Xeon 5400 series CPUs ( Harpertown) on the new Stoakley platform. Aside from the CPU change, the configurations remained identical. In April 2007, Apple began offering a dual quad-core configuration with 3.0GHz Xeon 5365 ( Cloverton) CPUs for $1,500 above the base configuration. The original Mac Pro sported a pair of dual-core Xeon 5100-series CPUs ( Woodcrest), and the default configuration contained two dual-core Xeon 5150s. The Mac Pro retained the by-then-familiar exterior look of the Power Macintosh G5, but did some major interior redecorating to accommodate four hard drives and two optical drives-double the G5's capacity. Originally introduced in August 2006, the Mac Pro's appearance completed Apple's transition from the PowerPC to Intel x86 processor architecture. One of these overlooked machines is the behemoth at the very top of the hardware heap, the Mac Pro. Indeed, it's almost possible to forget that Apple still sells some of the machines in its lineup. Quick specs: 2x3.0GHz quad core Xeon, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video cardĪpple's advertising is all about iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and portables. Manufacturer: Apple Computer ( product page) If Octopussy had a computer, would it have eight cores?
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