Apple today announced that the entire line of Mac Pros will now come standard with two 4 core Intel Xeon Processors. That’s a total of 8 cores starting at USD$2,799.00. One hell of a lot of power. The baseline system now specs out with Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” processors, 2GB memory (800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC), ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256MB memory, a 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive, and a 16x double-layer SuperDrive. Build to order options will allow you to take the processors up to 3.2GHz and bump the graphics card to a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT or a 1.5GB Quadro FX 5600.
Now this announcement is cool and all, but the real interesting thing here is the timing. Apple typically does these quiet bumps during Macworld. This announcement has come a week early which in my mind says one of two things (maybe both). One, they wanted to get an announcement out this week and steal a little press from CES or two, Macworld is going to be HUGE in 2008. I can’t wait for next week.
