I originally wasn’t going to cover this, but I figured I’d better.

With less than a week until MacWorld, Apple has come out with a few upgrades. First they came out with a new Mac Pro, now with 8-core standard (iCarumba!!) running up to 3.2 Ghz each (and this is on the new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon).

The basic configuration ($2799 US) includes:

- two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
- 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
- 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
- 16x SuperDrive™ with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
- two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
- Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; and much more.

I think it’s safe to say it’s really the fastest Mac ever.

They also came out with a new X-serve. It now includes built-in accelerated graphics to drive up to a 23″ Cinema Display and front facing USB 2.0 ports. The basic configuration ($2999 US) includes:

- a single 64-bit 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor with 12MB of L2 cache and a 1600 Mhz front side bus;
- 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM, expandable up to 32GB;
- a single 80GB SATA Apple Drive Module;
- dual Gigabit Ethernet on-board;
- internal graphics;
- two FireWire® 800 and three USB 2.0 ports; and
- an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

Server fans rejoice. You can find more info from the Press Release. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

[Image courtesy of Gizmodo]