Rumor: Intel Core i7-980x Mac Pros to come next Tuesday?

John Brownlee ()

Rumor: Intel Core i7-980x Mac Pros to come next Tuesday?It was as recently as December that Apple quietly bumped the specs of their Mac Pro line to use 3.33Ghz quad-core Xeon CPUs, but if ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes and his sources are to be believed, we could see the next Mac Pro as soon as next Tuesday, March 16th.

According to Kingsley-Hughes, the next Mac Pro will pack the Intel Core i7-980x CPU… which jives with a rumor we heard late last year, which also hinted a March release.

The Intel Core i7-980X is a 32nm chip, maxing out at 3.33GHz but packing six cores and twelve threads per chip… which could ultimately result in a dual-core Mac Pro boasting twelve physical and twenty four logical cores. Each Core i7-980X CPU also has 128MB of Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support, an integrated memory controller and supports DDR1066MHz memor. In other words, Mac Pros built on the Core i7-980x processor will see a huge performance boost over the current model.

Unfortunately, Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t have anything to report on the other high-end, pro-level Mac waiting for an Intel Core iX upgrade: the MacBook Pro. I think we can all take it as read that it’s coming, though: we’ll just have to bide our time patiently in the meanwhile.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Mac Pro, News |

  • MacRat

    And all the February rumors about new MacBook Pros being released any day now have all been forgotten.

  • Nick

    In the article above “jives” should be “jibes”:

    “Jibe” would mean (in this context) for things to be in accord or agreement.

    “Jive” would mean to talk nonsense. (e.g. The Bee Gee’s “Jive Talkin’”).

    So these are very different, almost opposite meanings in the context of the article.

    Very useful article, though. Thanks!

  • woot

    dude, the store i work in have been selling those cpu’s for quite some time so its nothing new..