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New Mac Pros

Yesterday, Apple released several updates to their Mac Pro line of professional desktop computers.

	New 8 Core High-End Model	Previous 8 Core High-End Model
Processor	2x Quad core Xeon 5400 at 3.2 GHz	2x Quad core Xeon 5300 at 3.0 GHz
Cache	12 MB per processor (24 MB total)	8 MB per processor (16 MB total)
SSE extensions	128-bit SSE4	128-bit SSE3
Frontside Bus	1.6 GHz	1.33 GHz
Memory	800 MHz DDR2	667MHz DDR2
Max. memory	32 GB	16 GB
PCI Express	2.0	1.0
Bluetooth 2.0	As standard	Extra charge
Keyboard USB hub	USB 2.0	USB 1.1

This is a big improvement over the previous 8 core model. I must admit that I wasn't a fan of the previous one because I felt that the other components were slowing down the processor. The reason for this is that the quad core model had a front side bus (FSB) speed of 1.33 GHz which means a speed of ~333 MHz per core. When the 8 core model was introduced, it kept the same FSB, meaning it only had access to ~166 MHz per core. This bottleneck caused the 8 core model to be rather underwhelming in certain situations, in some cases being outperformed by the quad core version. Overall it was a faster machine, but not as fast as it could have been.

This new version increases the processor clock speed, the FSB, there is more cache available and the memory bandwidth has increased too. If you increase one element, it will eventually bottleneck unless you increase the others, so Apple is doing the right thing by increasing them all at the same time. This thing will scream.

It's worth talking a bit about the new processor too. It is a Xeon 5400 (codename "Harpertown") with SSE4 instructions instead of SSE3 with the old model. What does this mean? Instruction sets are a list of commands that a processor can perform. They are stored in a native form which means it is much faster for the processor to execute one of these instructions to perform a task than it is to convert it from a programming language to its native form. SSE4 has several mathematical instructions that will greatly speed up video encoding and decoding, particularly when using high definition formats.

The Mac Pro now features PCI Express 2.0 which offers 500 MB/s per lane over the previous 250 MB/s. This means that the 16 lane slot for the graphics card can now transfer data at 8 GB/s over the previous 4 GB/s. Brand new graphics cards are available, including the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600, with 1.5 GB of memory (!) and a price tag to match. The other cards are the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256 MB (the standard card) and the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB. This is great news for Motion and Color users.

Apple is now offering 1 TB hard drives with 32 MB of cache for use with the Mac Pro. This allows you to have up to 4 TB of storage inside the machine, up from the previous 3 TB.

This is a really great machine. Apple has a lot of benchmarks here. The new machine seems to be a consistent 10-20% faster than the previous 8 core model. And this is just the two base models with 4 GB RAM. Upgrading to a better graphics card and more memory for example would probably widen the gap even further in Final Cut Pro 6. It's also interesting to look back nostalgically upon the Quad Power Mac G5. In its time, this machine was a speed demon but the new Mac Pro is about 100-200% faster in most tests.

The fact that Apple is releasing these models now means that there will be no significant Mac Pro announcements at Macworld next week.