processor screenshot

Start your engines. All eight of them.

Intel Xeon

Up to 2x faster.

Eight-core processing power was once only top-of-the-line. Now it comes standard. This time around, performance is more phenomenal than ever — up to two times faster than the previous standard-configuration Mac Pro. And with the multicore technology enhancements of Mac OS X Leopard, the new Mac Pro is a force to be reckoned with.

More power with less power.

Inside the new Mac Pro is the latest technology from Intel: Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” processors. These processors run at blazingly fast speeds up to 3.2GHz. Based on the new 45-nm Intel Core microarchitecture, these processors deliver amazing performance but still maintain outstanding energy efficiency.

CPU Architecture

Cache count.

A huge amount of L2 cache — 12MB per processor — keeps frequently used data and instructions close to the processor cores and improves overall performance. 6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time.

Built at full tilt.

With the fastest Xeon architecture available, the new Mac Pro features 1600MHz dual independent frontside buses. These 64-bit buses give each processor a direct connection to the system controller and deliver improved processor bandwidth of up to 25.6GB per second — 20 percent greater than the previous Mac Pro. With a new system architecture, speedier system buses and fast 800MHz DDR2 fully buffered DIMM memory, Mac Pro memory throughput is up to 1.6 times faster than before.

Every Intel Xeon processor features an enhanced SSE4 SIMD engine. Capable of completing 128-bit vector computations in a single cycle, SSE4 is ideal for transforming large sets of data, such as applying a filter to an image or rendering a video effect.

Smarter memory.

The Mac Pro incorporates a 256-bit-wide, fully buffered memory architecture with Error Correction Code (ECC), which corrects single-bit errors and detects multiple-bit errors automatically. These features are especially important in mission-critical or compute-intensive environments. Apple designed a more stringent thermal specification for the Mac Pro FB-DIMMs, so the internal fans spin at slower speeds and keep the system quiet.