Unveiled: hot hardware releases
A first peep at a top-end AMD processor, the “first 1ms IPS display” and the new Apple Mac Pro.
Content creators and other datacrunching professionals have been crying out for a new Mac Pro for six years – maybe Apple was giving them a chance to save up.
The company has finally revealed the 2019 Mac Pro, but with prices starting from $6,000 this machine is aimed squarely at production houses and pros with deep pockets.
Perhaps the biggest change for the Mac Pro – due out in September – is that it can be expanded and upgraded to fit user requirements over time. This modular approach – and full access to the Pro’s internals – means users can customise the workstation, taking advantage of features such as the eight PCIe expansion slots.
It’s unclear what higher specced machines will cost, but for those with cavernous budgets, the Mac Pro can be configured with Xeon processors running up to 28 cores and a limit of 1.5TB of memory, made possible by a six-channel memory architecture and 12 physical DIMM slots.
According to Apple, the Pro features the world’s most powerful graphics architecture, with a range of configuration options maxing out at two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs, which would provide 56 teraflops of graphics performance and 128GB of video memory. Impressive stuff, but estimates on the price of a top-end machine are in the tens of thousands.
However, not everyone is convinced by the 2019 edition. The lack of support for Nvidia graphics has disappointed some in the 3D rendering industry, where many rely on Nvidia’s CUDA platform.
The Pro is offered with the $4,999 Pro Display XDR, which sports a 32in