new Mac Pro signals commitment to professional computing

Apple is sending a signal that it hasn't abandoned the professional computing market with the latest Mac Pro, which will ship next month. But the workstation faces competition from its own sibling iMac as computer buyers weigh purchases. Loyalists of Apple's Mac Pro have been clamoring for an upgrade to the high-end desktop, which last received a facelift in 2010. The new workstation is priced starting at US$2,999 and has the latest Intel Xeon E5 processors, solid-state drive storage, Thunderbolt 2 and dual graphics cards tightly packed in a cylindrical chassis. The Mac Pro is targeted largely at creative professionals and engineers and has drawn interest for its new design and use of the latest technologies. "Apple has dominated the creative market for years. They have a lot of loyal users there, and those guys are influential," said Roger Kay, president at Endpoint Technologies Associates. The slow Mac Pro upgrade cycle led some to believe that Apple was terminating its high-end product lineup in favor of consumer products. There were concerns that the Mac Pro would be merged into the iMac line, much like the Xserve, which in 2010 was merged into the Mac Pro line. But Apple CEO Tim Cook last year confirmed that a new Mac Pro was on its way, and the product was announced in October. The new Mac Pro supports external 4K displays and has customized Apple motherboards with SSD storage provided via PCI-Express 3.0 slots. The $2,999 model has a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 chip based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, 10MB of L3 cache, 12GB of DDR3 DRAM and dual Advanced Micro Devices FirePro D300 GPUs. The $3,999 model has a 3.5GHz six-core Xeon E5 processor, 12MB of cache, 16GB of DRAM and dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of dedicated GDDR5 VRAM. Other standard Mac Pro features include six Thunderbolt 2 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless and HDMI ports. The desktops can be configured to include faster processors and up to 64GB of DRAM. Craig Seeman, owner of Third Planet Video, a video production company in Brooklyn, New York, said that the Mac Pro's entry price is lower than expected. The latest hardware, especially two graphics processors, is one reason he will upgrade to the latest system. "The smaller design is much more space efficient. This is of major importance to those of us who work in small and often crowded offices," Seeman said. Given the similar price point for the new and previous Mac Pros, the move to two GPUs cannot be underestimated, especially given that time is money for professional users, Seeman said. The standardization of dual GPUs will facilitate software development so more video rendering and other computing tasks are off-loaded to graphics processors from CPUs, Seeman said. download temple run for 5800 download pdf password cracker pro 2 crack download sterowniki do ati mobility radeon hd 5470 download backup manager for ps3 download garmin unlocker alternative v7.1.6 download mxkey htc unlocker tool v1.0 addon download minecraft xray texture pack mac download facebook messenger untuk hp nokia download english hindi talking dictionary software download flash player 9 pc