12 core beast: Apple Mac Pro

Apple’s Mac Pro desktops have always been ahead of the curve in terms of price, power, and performance. The choice of serious photographers, graphics pros, and video editors, Mac Pros are all about raw computing muscle and speed. These are top-of-the-food-chain computers engineered from the ground up for blazing performance.

The form factor has not changed since the Power Mac G5: large and heavy aluminium enclosure with perforated grills to vent as much air through the processors, graphics cards, and hard drives, which are all running at optimum performance. The internal components, however, have been completely overhauled.

Now with staggering new dual six-core 2.93GHz Intel “Westmere” processors—for a total of 12 cores—and up to a possible 32GB of RAM, the new Mac Pro has reached a new pinnacle of desktop computing.

“The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and configurable Mac we’ve ever made,” says Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With up to 12 cores, the new Mac Pro outperforms our previous top-of-the-line system by up to 50 percent, and with over a billion possible configurations, our customers can create exactly the system they want.”