Apple’s promised modular Mac Pro has popped up on the FCC registry site, with its regulatory testing information publicly released. Expect its release soon, along with the 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Display.
The new pro desktop boasts workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture for the most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, an accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.
The Mac Pro features Xeon processors up to 28 cores, with 64 PCI Express lanes. It also provides over 300W of power along with a state-of-the-art thermal architecture to allow the processor to run fully unconstrained all the time.
Featuring a six-channel memory architecture and 12 physical DIMM slots, the new Mac Pro allows for 1.5TB of memory, the most ever available in a Mac. With eight PCI Express expansion slots, that’s twice that of the previous-generation Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro features up to 56 teraflops of graphics performance in a single system. Its graphics expansion architecture, the Apple MPX Module, features Thunderbolt integration and over 500W of power, both firsts for any graphics card. And for quiet operation, the MPX Module is cooled by the Mac Pro system thermals.
Mac Pro graphics options start with the Radeon Pro 580X. Mac Pro debuts the Radeon Pro Vega II, featuring up to 14 teraflops of compute performance and 32GB of memory with 1TB/s of memory bandwidth, the highest of any GPU. The Mac Pro also introduces the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, which features two Vega II GPUs for 28 teraflops of graphics performance and 64GB of memory. The pro desktop can accommodate two MPX Modules so customers can use two Vega II Duos for 56 teraflops of graphics performance and 128GB of video memory.
The new Mac Pro debuts Afterburner, featuring a programmable ASIC capable of decoding up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. With Afterburner, video editors using high-quality cameras that require the conversion of native file formats into proxies for editing can now use native formats right from the camera and decode up to three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video and 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video in real time.
The design of the new Mac Pro starts with a stainless-steel space frame with an aluminum housing that lifts off for 360-degree access to the entire system. The frame provides a foundation for modularity and flexibility, and incorporates smooth handles for moving the desktop around the studio. The housing also features a lattice pattern to maximize airflow and quiet operation. For additional performance results for the all-new Mac Pro, see apple.com/mac-pro.
