A lot of people where expecting a new Mac Pro or a certain Mac Pro X would be released. Well, at the WWDC 2013, Apple unveiled the new Mac Pro 2013 with more powerful horse power and a uniquely designed body. People did get to see the new Mac Pro but they were not expecting to see something totally different. The new Mac Pro 2013 features a completely and totally new redesigned body and internals. See more details below.

Image courtesy: Engadget

The new Mac Pro 2013 features a cylinder-like body with a unified thermal core system. According to Apple, the new Mac Pro has up to 60 GB/s memory bandwidth which is 2x higher bandwidth than the current Mac Pro. It also has a PCIe bandwidth of up to 40GB/s and up to 12 Cores of processing power. That’s 2x faster than its predecessors. For some, the designed and shape might be a joke but what’s under the hood is certainly not a joke.

Mac Pro 2013 Specifications

The Design and Thermal Solution

 

The new Mac Pro 2013 has cylindrical shape body which is 9.9-inches tall and 6.6-inches in diameter. Yes, it’s small but unbelievably powerful. It has three main boards inside, two of which is for the GPU and other other one is for the CPU and memory. The input/output is located on the other side or on top the CPU portion.

It features a unique cooling system which Apple calls a unified thermal core system, where the CPU and GPU are cooled by one triangular heatsink, and the heatsink is cooled by a huge single fan.

 

What’s Under the Hood

 

The new Mac Pro 2013 is said to be powered by the latest Intel Xeon E5 processor, paired with a four-channel ECC DDR3 memory clocked at 1866MHz, which is capable of delivering 60GBps of memory bandwidth. It’s processor will be a 12 core processor with 256-bit wide floating point instructions.

Its graphics processor will be taken care of a dual AMD FirePro W9000, which is dubbed by AMD as the most powerful professional graphics card, capable of delivering up to 7 teraflops of GPU performance. It supports OpenCL so it doesn’t support CUDA. It has 4069 stream processor, 384-bit memory and 528GBps total bandwidth.

 

Thanks to its GPU processing power, the new Mac Pro 2013 supports 4K display resolution via an Ultra HD Thunderbolt 2 ports, and can deliver up to 3 4K displays simultaneously.

In terms of its storage solution, the new Mac Pro 2013 is said to be taken care of by a PCI Express-based flash storage, that is said to be 10 times faster than a SATA HDD and 2.5 faster than a SATA SSD.

 

If you are not familiar with PCI Express type of SSD, check out the OCZ Z-Drive R4 RM Series.

The Mac Pro 2013 has 6x Thunderbolt ports, 4x USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, a dual Gigabit Ethernet port, a speaker and headphone/earphone port. It also has wireless connectivity options such as Bluetooth 4.0, and a faster WiFi 802.11ac connection.

 

What People Don’t Like About the Mac Pro 2013

As I was reading the news about the new Mac Pro 2013, I also read some comments from the people. The new Mac Pro 2013 does have a unique design and a powerful CPU and GPU processing power, but it lacks expandability and upgradability. And although the design is somewhat innovative, many people didn’t like the design at all.

Unlike with the previous generation of Mac Pro, you can’t upgrade or change your GPU or any other parts of the system. You will be stuck with the FirePro that uses OpenCL. If you are a CUDA-based developer then you will not like this.

I don’t know if you are still using a DVD drive or Blu-Ray drive, but there’s no optical drive. Instead you can use an external optical drive solution if you need one.

You can’t also plugin or add additional SSD or HDD storage. It’s either you will have to buy a customized Mac Pro 2013 with a large storage capacity or you will have to settle with an external storage which is definitely a cheaper solution.

And lastly, people are expecting that the price would be way more expensive than the previous generation of Mac Pro. Most consumers don’t want an expensive flashy solution, instead they want a better but affordable solution.

Mac Pro 2013 Price and Availability

Apple didn’t disclosed how much the price of the new Mac Pro 2013 would be. They also didn’t disclosed any storage option either. But if you factor the technology that is built with it you might be surprise how much this PC would cost. The latest Intel Xeon processors are expected to be expensive than their predecessors, ECC based memory are more expensive than non-ECC memory, a DUAL workstation class FirePro W9000 is definitely an expensive solution and finally a PCI-E based SSD is more expensive than a SATA based SSD.

The current Apple Mac Pro MD771LL/A Desktop sells for $3,627.99. And its basic specifications are two 6-Core Intel Xeon CPU clocked at 2.4GHz, 12GB of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC, 1TB SATA HDD 7200 RPM, ATI RAdeon HD 5770 GPU and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Compare that specs with the new Mac Pro 2013, we should expect a much higher price.