Apple Replaces G5 Line With Mac Pro

WWDC has come and gone. As one has come to expect from this event Apple, has made exciting announcements on product refreshes and new launches. The biggest announcement made by Steve Jobs was concerning the future line of powerful desktops, which is meant to replace the PowerMacs. The IBM made G5 era has finally come to an end. It gets replaced by the new Mac Pro which runs on the very fast and powerful Dual Core Xeon 5100 series of processors. The Mac Pro it will run at speeds of up to 3 GHz with 4 MB of shared L2 cache. Each processor will have independent 1.33GHz Front Side Buses (FSB), with the capability of processing over 21 gigabyte per second (GB/s) processor bandwidth. The processors will be complimented with four-channel, 256-bit 667MHZ fully-buffered memory, up to 16GB. The Mac Pro for storage will support up to four 500GB Serial ATA hard drives for up to 2 terabytes (TB) of internal storage. It also possesses two dual optical drive bays offering expansion for optical media devices. All the new Mac Pros will come three full-length PCI Express expansion slots and one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot. The machines will also include two USB 2.0, one FireWire 400 and one FireWire 800 ports on the front, as well as additional FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and three USB 2.0 ports on the back panel. In a rather surprising but somewhat odd choice graphics will be handled by an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card with 256MB of video memory, with the capacity to display images on two screens and support for Apple’s 30-inch Cinema HD Display. Though the option to upgrade to X1900 and Quadro FX 4500 are available it might have been more suitable to have paired such a powerful machine with a more powerful offering from Nvidia such as the 7900 GT.