Apple Talks Up Mac Pro, Cylindrical Workstation Beast Coming In December

In addition to Apple’s announcement of the iPad Air (holy cow, that thing is slim), the company talked up the innovative, cylinder-shaped Mac Pro that we heard about during Apple’s WWDC back in June.

The Mac Pro’s premier feature is its “unified thermal core”, which is a shorthand way of describing its overall design with all of the components facing inward and the heat dissipation working vertically, all aided by a single bottom-mounted intake fan.

Apple Mac Pro

Running on up to a 12-core Intel Xeon processor (with 3.9GHz Turbo), the Mac Pro boasts dual AMD FirePro GPUs (up to 12GB of G-DDR5 VRAM, 528GBps bandwidth, up to 7 teraflops); up to 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 memory with a four-channel controller and up to 60GBps bandwidth; and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage (up to 1.2/1GBps read/write speeds).

Apple Mac Pro

It also features six Thunderbolt 2 ports, dual Ethernet ports, HDMI, four USB 3.0 ports, a lone audio input, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a motion sensor. The system will ship with Mac OS X Mavericks and can support up to three 4K displays.

Apple Mac Pro

For all the superb components the Mac Pro boasts, the chassis is tiny; it stands just 9.9 inches high. It’s a completely re-thought take on a workstation machine, and it can be yours in December, starting at $2,999. The starting price gets you a quad-core Intel Xeon E5 (3.7GHz), dual AMD FirePro GPUs (2GB VRAM each), 12Gb of memory, and 256GB PCIe flash storage.

You can imagine how much a fully loaded Mac Pro might cost, but even the base configuration is a beastly rig.