Sometimes to take major step forward
you have completely change direction!
When we began work on Mac Pro, we considered every element that defines a pro computer — graphics, storage, expansion, processing power, and memory. And we challenged ourselves to find the best, most forward-looking way possible to engineer each one of them. When we put it all together, the result was something entirely new. Something radically different from anything before it. Something that provides an extremely powerful argument against the status quo.
The new power structure
Engineered around workstation graphics with dual GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage, high-performance Thunderbolt 2, Xeon processors, fast memory, and support for 4K video, Mac Pro delivers brilliant performance across the board.
Processor
Mac Pro is muscle through and through, starting with the Intel Xeon E5, available with 6, 8, or 12 cores of processing power on a single die. And with up to 30MB of L3 cache, 40GB/s of PCI Express gen 3 bandwidth, and 256-bit-wide floating-point instructions, you’ll never be at a loss for speed.
Memory
Every component in Mac Pro is optimized for performance. That includes a four-channel DDR3 memory controller running at 1866MHz. It supports up to 64GB of memory and delivers up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth, which means you can fly through even the most compute-intensive tasks in no time. And since it’s ECC memory, your render job, video export, or simulation won’t be stopped by transient memory errors.
Graphics
Traditionally, pro computers have relied primarily on the CPU for their computing power. But as GPU performance has dramatically increased, software developers have begun to leverage that power in their apps. With Mac Pro, we looked ahead and engineered an even more powerful GPU architecture. Not only does it feature an AMD FirePro workstation-class GPU — it features two of them. And each is available with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM with up to 2048 stream processors. With all that power, you’ll be able to do things like seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background — and still have enough power to connect up to three high-resolution 5K displays.
Storage
There’s flash storage, and then there’s next-generation PCIe-based flash storage. We’re talking storage that’s up to 2.4 times faster than the fastest SATA-based solid-state drive and up to 10 times faster than a 7200-rpm SATA hard drive. Most flash storage systems connect via SATA buses designed for slower spinning hard drives. But we designed Mac Pro around PCIe-based flash controller technology to deliver the fastest solid-state drives available standard in a desktop computer. So you’ll have up to 1TB of storage that will let you boot up, launch apps, and even open massive files in, well, a flash.
A unified thermal core.
Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core. Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them. No computer has been built this way before. And yet it makes so much sense, it’s now hard to imagine building one any other way.
A single break-thorugh fan.
An incredible amount of innovation went into designing a fan system capable of cooling such a high-performance device. Instead of adding extra fans, we engineered a single, larger fan that pulls air upward through a bottom intake. As air passes vertically through the center of the device, it absorbs heat and carries it out the top. It’s simple and elegant — and also astonishingly quiet. To achieve that, we had to consider every detail: the number of blades, the size of the blades, the spacing of the blades, and even the shape of the blades. By minimizing air resistance throughout the system, we were able to design a fan with backward-curved impeller blades that runs at fewer revolutions per minute, draws air more efficiently as it spins, and creates considerably less noise.
Expansion - vastly expanded.
In creating Mac Pro, we wanted to provide an enormous amount of expansion — without being limited to the space inside the enclosure. Designed with built-in Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 ports, Mac Pro has everything you need to build a workstation completely customized to what you need and how you work.
Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt combines PCI Express and DisplayPort into one high-speed, versatile I/O technology. Thunderbolt 2 delivers twice the throughput of Thunderbolt, providing up to 20Gb/s of bandwidth to each external device. So you can connect high-performance peripherals, without being limited by the number of expansion slots inside your computer. You can connect massive amounts of storage, add a PCI expansion chassis, and work with the latest external displays — including 4K desktop displays and peripheral devices capable of broadcast monitoring in 4K. And since each Thunderbolt 2 port allows you to daisy-chain up to six peripherals, you can go all out by plugging in up to 36 external devices via Thunderbolt 2 alone.
