Apple announces 8-Core & Quad-Core Mac Pro

Just in — Apple announced the availability of an 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. These are practically two Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors running at 3.0GHz.

Here are the tech specs:

8-core Processing

* Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 series processors
* Intel Core microarchitecture Intel Xeon
– 8MB of L2 cache per processor (16MB total; each pair of cores shares 4MB)
– 128-bit SSE3 vector engine
– 64-bit data paths and registers
– Energy efficiency optimization
* 1.33GHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses

Quad-core Processing

* Two 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 series processors
* Intel Core microarchitecture
– 4MB of shared L2 cache per processor (8MB total)
– 128-bit SSE3 vector engine
– 64-bit data paths and registers
– Energy efficiency optimization
* 1.33GHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses

Memory

* 667MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory
* Eight FB-DIMM slots on two memory riser cards (four slots per card) supporting up to 16GB of main memory
* 256-bit-wide memory architecture

Graphics and displays

* Double-wide, 16-lane PCI Express graphics slot with one of the following graphics cards installed:
– NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM, one single-link DVI port, and one dual-link DVI port
– ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512MB of GDDR3 SDRAM and two dual-link DVI ports
– NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 with 512MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, two dual-link DVI ports, and one stereo 3D port