Mac Pro : Technical Details of Apple’s Workstation

Mac Pro is Apple’s most powerful and highly configurable Intel Xeon“based workstation computer came as successor of Apple Power Mac G5 series. Due to highly configurable nature, pricing of Mac Pro falls within a range from $2,499.00 to $3,799.00 (at the time of writing) and you can configure up to the price tag $14,366.00 (extra softwares are not calculated). Previously we wrote what to choose MacBook Pro 15? or MacBook Pro 13? or MacBook Air that satisfies your need. Before you start reading this Apple Mac Pro Buying Guide, you must look at few articles like Apple MacBook Pro Buying Guide and What is a Workstation computer. Mac Pro is the only living kind of classic Workstation Computer in the consumer market, other Workstations are manufactured by IBM, Sun Microsystems and other classic computing companies whose target audience is not the consumer market for their this class of computers. Workstation is loosely use terminology now by virtue of Advertisements. Actually, real Workstations from other brands will cost more; for some brands, a consumer can not buy a single unit. If you do not have the need of a Workstation Computer, you can simply go for iMac or Mac Mini for lesser cost. It is a bit rare to get any review of Mac Pro in your favorite copy-paste type News websites. At $1,999 one can buy a iMac with the highest spec and need not to know the technical difference. In fact, if you perform a search with Mac Pro Review, you will get more results for MacBook Pro Review. At the end of this year, Mac Pro will receive a change. Actually, MacBook Pro technically can not be compared with a closer priced Notebook version of PC Computer for architectural reasons. The CPU fall back to consumer grade for MacBook Pro, but it is really not for casual web surfing.

As a note – Not all products of Apple are great. There are many products from Apple which basically are not great – they are indented for the “Brand Lovers” instead of “need based solution” seekers. Definitely, with money, everything costly can be bought, but that is not what way of using applied science. Mac Pro’s upper segment becomes the Server series.

Basic History of Mac Pro

The Mac Pro is a typical Workstation with Tower Cabinet, this conceptual the design which is actually copied by the consumer market. From Microcomputer suddenly the new Personal Computer has not born in one day. Is the closest successor of the Apple Power Mac G5 series, with few differences and inherits its aluminum housing still now (due to its striking grille designs of the front; in professional circles often jokingly referred to “cheese grater”). The Mac Pro is a workstation similar to other UNIX workstations such as those previously manufactured by Sun Microsystems. Although the high-end technical market has not traditionally been an area of strength for Apple, the company has been positioning itself as a leader in non-linear digital editing for high-definition video, which demands storage and memory far in excess of a general desktop machine. Additionally, the codecs used in these applications are generally processor intensive and highly threadable, speeding up almost linearly with additional processor cores. Apple’s previous machine aimed at this market, the Power Mac G5, had up to two dual-core processors (marketed as “Quad-Core”), but lacked the storage expansion capabilities of the newer design. Mac Pro was first available on 7 August 2006 at Apple WWDC and now comes with either one or two Intel Xeon Processors. The starter range has one processor which is Quad-Core while the top model comes with two processors and has 12 Cores. You can read about these multi cores – Quad Core, Hexa Core (MacBook Pro is Hexa) etcetera.

With the Intel Core 2-based architecture Mac Pro, according to Apple’s marketing materials went about twice as fast as the previous generation of Macs, which was based on the PowerPC architecture. On 8th January 2008, a further revision of the Mac Pro went with i5400X chipset and Xeon 5400 CPUs. In 9th August 2010 another Mac Pro with one or two Intel Xeon processor were presented which were based on Intel Nehalem and Westmere CPU architecture. The current Mac Pro was updated in 11th June 2012 and has up to two Intel Xeon E5645 processors as well as with one 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor.

On 10th June 2013, Apple announced new models of Mac Pro with a completely new design based on a black aluminum cylinder as a housing which will be delivered the end of 2013. Improvements included new processors, flash memory, video cards and more. The new Mac Pro is jokingly compared with a trash bag or towel dispensers due to its shape – it is difficult not to get astonished at the first sight. Probably this is the right design for better colling at lesser space.

Other Points of Mac Pro

You will get the technical details in official website, there is absolutely no meaning of copy pasting the specs. The Mac Pro comes with the EFI 1.1 and handles booting differently from the conventional BIOS-based PC. You can read about EFI and BIOS for more details. There are a number of challenges that one must face when trying to establish a multi-booting configuration on a single hard drive that uses the new GPT partitioning standard that Mac OS takes advantage of at the same time as the MBR. Logical and extended MBR partitions are not possible to configure. Mac Pro do not fall back to on-board graphics card -unlike MacBook Pro – without graphics card Mac Pro will boot fine, though nothing graphical will be possible (screen sharing, vnc, etc) to do. There is a quite big difference of speed of multi tasking when compared with the top configuration on MacBook Pro.