Apple Finalizes Transition to Intel Processors

Staff Reporter -- Electronic News, 8/8/2006

Consumer electronics giant Apple Computer Inc. completed the transition to Intel processors in its entire Mac family and debuted yesterday a Xeon-based 64-bit desktop workstation at its Worldwide Design Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
 
At its heart, the Mac Pro contains two new dual-core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0 GHz.

"Apple has successfully completed the transition to using Intel processors in just seven months -- 210 days to be exact," Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, said in a statement. "And what better product to complete it with than the new Mac Pro, the workstation Mac users have been dreaming about."

The Mac Pro is shipping now with the standard prebuilt configuration, including two 2.66GHz dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 series processors, priced at $2,499.

Apple claims the new Mac Pro is up to twice as fast as the Power Mac G5 Quad, based on industry standard benchmarks. The two dual-core Intel Xeon processors each contain 4MB of shared L2 cache and independent 1.33GHz front-side buses. With 667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered memory, the Mac Pro also contains a 256-bit wide memory architecture.

The Mac Pro allows for user customization with more than 4.9 million possible configurations, Apple said. The machine features a direct attach storage solution for cable free, snap in installation of up to four 500GB serial ATA hard drives for a total of 2TB of internal storage and support for two optical drives to simultaneously read and/or write to CDs and DVDs.

Each Mac Pro also includes three full-length PCI Express expansion slots and one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot to support high-powered, double-wide graphics cards without sacrificing multiple slots.

The front panel of the Mac Pro includes a FireWire 800 port, a FireWire 400 port and two USB 2.0 ports with additional FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and three USB 2.0 ports on the back panel. Mac Pro also includes dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical digital input and output, analog audio input and output, and optional built-in support for AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.

Additionally, the Mac Pro includes the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of video memory for built-in support of dual-displays and Apple's 30-inch cinema HD Display.

The ATI Radeon X1900 XT and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, both with 512MB of video memory, are available as build-to-order options. The Mac Pro supports up to four PCI Express graphics cards to drive up to eight displays at once for advanced visualization and large display walls.

The debut of the Mac Pro is some good news for the company, which has been eyed with tension in recent weeks as it has become yet another company caught up in the industry-wide stock options backdating scandal.

Last week, the company announced that it would likely restate its finances from a number of years, after finding "irregularities" in an internal investigation of its stock option granting practices.

Apple's stock took a hit after last week's stock options-related news, but seems to be on the rebound after yesterday's product launches at the worldwide developers conference. At the opening bell this morning, the company's stock opened at $67.09 - numbers close to those Apple was seeing before last week's deflating news.