Alongside today's 16-inch MacBook Pro announcement, Apple has also confirmed that their long-awaited redesign of the Mac Pro, which has been due this fall, will be launching next month.

Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro desktop will be the company’s highest-performing desktop in years and will address the key issues of the cylindrical Mac Pro, namely insufficient graphics performance as well as limited expandability. The Mac Pro systems will be based on Intel’s Xeon W processors with up to 28 cores paired with up to 1.5 TB of DDR4-2933 as well as up to 4 TB of solid-state storage (using two SSDs based on the T2 controller). To offer its customers a whopping compute and graphics performance, Apple will equip its Mac Pro with up to two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards in MPX form-factor with a total of 16384 stream processors (4096 SPs per GPU) and 128 GB of HBM2 memory (32 GB per GPU). Furthermore, the systems may be equipped with the Afterburner ProRes and ProRes RAW FPGA-based accelerator card, or any other accelerator that is compatible with PCIe 3.0 bus (granted that the system has 64 PCIe lanes). In fact, with a 1.4 kW PSU, the new Mac Pro could accommodate quite a lot of options.

With the new Mac Pro workstation offering massive performance, its owners will naturally benefit from new high-resolution displays and here Apple has a unique proposition with its unique Pro Display XDR, which is also due out in December. The 32-inch monitor is based on a 10-bit IPS panel and features a 6016×3384 resolution, 1,000 nits – 1,600 nits brightness (sustained/peak), and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio because of Mini-LED backlighting.

Apple will start taking orders on its new Mac Pro as well as Pro Display XDR in December. The Mac Pro workstation will start at $5,999 for a version with an eight-core processor. The standard version of the monitor will be priced at $4,999, whereas a model with nano-texture glass will be priced at $5,999. The display will come without a stand or VESA mount adapter that will have to be acquired separately for $999 and $199, respectively.

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Source: Apple

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  • web2dot0 - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link

    You aren't their target market. LOL.

    You people just don't get it.

    No one is forcing you to get one.
  • mode_13h - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link

    Charming, aren't we?
  • zanon - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    This would have a been a lot more exciting a year or two ago before Epyc Rome and the current ongoing spate of Intel CPU bugs (two more today, whee) made the Intel bandwidth choking, feature gating and price premium look even worse than previously. Apple's idiotic forever-spat with Nvidia also torpedos a lot of the machine's pro potential, CUDA utterly dominates compute applications. Even with the price premium, if it was EPYC + Nvidia GPUs, and had all the storage plain PCIe it'd be a lot much more compelling. The own-goals are regrettable.
  • M O B - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Have the full details of the Nvidia/Apple feud ever come to light? I had assumed it was Apple not allowing CUDA in 10.14+ and requiring Nvidia to fully support Metal, but is there more than that?
  • prophet001 - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link

    Nobody likes playing with Apple.
  • Kevin G - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link

    This Mac Pro had perfectly OK specs when it was announced in June but nearly six months later, it already looks dated before release. (And for those keeping track, this Mac Pro will be shipping a full six years after the last iteration.)

    Epyc Rome is indeed the biggest thing to happen in servers in a long while. Higher performance at radically lower cost than Intel is a game changer. Not only would Apple have saved money in terms of processor selection, they wouldn't need any PCIe bridges either. As a bonus, Apple could have enabled Infinity Fabric to the GPUs from the Epyc CPU socket for even more bandwidth and coherency support. That is a win-win-win scenario.

    The other factor Apple seemingly has missed is video card selection. I get the choice of Vega 20 for the highend config but the baseline probably should move upward to a RX 5700. The baseline Mac Pro graphics card is a ~$200 equivalent in the PC work now.

    I just hope Mac users don't have to wait six more years for a refresh.
  • mode_13h - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link

    Apple doesn't care about what other people are doing. Not CUDA, nor even the industry standard they, themselves created - OpenCL! Neither are supported.

    If you're a software vendor and you want access to Apple's big-spending customer base, you'll have to use Metal, for your GPU Compute. That's just how it is.

    People who want to use CUDA applications probably aren't buying Macs, anyhow.
  • CharonPDX - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link

    With the 16" MacBook Pro getting a SINGLE 8 TB SSD option, I wonder if this new Mac Pro will get a 16 TB (dual 8 TB) option, instead of the current-max dual 2 TB? It seems odd that the portable can have double the storage of the tower... (Although the photos of the motherboard on Apple's website also show it has two SATA ports, I wonder if there is space for two 3.5" spinny drives in there?

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