Apple unveils new Mac Pro

Looks like a can ? Apple announced the newMac Pro, Apple’s new desktop workstation features a cylindrical design. Apple didn’t announce a formal ship date, stating that the new Mac Pro will ship later this year, nor did it talk about pricing or specific models. It will be made in the United States. The new 9.9-inch tall Mac Pro case is about one-eighth the size of the Mac Pro tower. 

The entire top of the Mac Pro is a handle for carrying, and motion sensor lights show the I/O ports. 

At the heart of the Mac Pro is a Xeon E5 processor, which is based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and introduced by the company last April. Configurations with 12-cores will be available, and all Mac Pros will use third-generation PCI Express architecture. Apple is also using 1866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM.

Schiller also went to great lengths to emphasize the new Mac Pro’s graphics performance. The machine will have dual AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, and be able to run three 4K displays at one time. Apple says the new Mac Pro's graphics performance is 2.5 times faster than its predecessor.

The new MacPro will have Thunderbolt 2, the newest iteration of Intel’s Thunderbolt technology that supports data rates of 20 gbps. Thunderbolt 2 will be a critical technology for new Mac Pro users—it will provide connectivity for legacy devices. The most remarkable change with the Mac Pro is the elimination of expansion slots. The previous Mac Pro had a pair of 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots and a pair of 4-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots. For current owners who have filled their Mac Pro’s slots and still need to use their cards, you’ll have to invest in an external Thunderbolt expansion chassis that will house expansion cards and connect to the new Mac Pro via Thunderbolt.

The Mac Pro is designed for speed, and Apple is outfitting the machine with PCIe-based flash memory, not traditional SATA hard drives or solid-state drives. Apple touts speeds of 1.25 GBps for reads and 1.0 GBps for writes. The company did not give specifics as to the amount of storage available.