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.