At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled the most powerful computers in its history. The new Mac Pro, a quad Xeon, 64-bit desktop workstation outfitted with two new Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0 GHz, is said to offer nearly twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 Quad, the popular choice for many users of Apple's Final Cut Studio.
Apple said the new Mac Pro speeds up video editing, boasts real-time effects, and enhances multistream and multicamera production. A choice of PCI Express graphics cards, including the ATI Radeon X1900 XT or the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500, improve motion graphics and animation performance in such applications as Apple Motion and Aperture, Autodesk Maya, and Luxology Modo.
The capability to install up to four 500 GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drives for up to 2 TB of internal storage is a major new feature. Users can stripe them together using Mac OS X RAID for blazing access to digital media files. The tower housing also provides two optical drive bays. One comes filled with a 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support, while the other can be outfitted with anything, including new Blu-ray high-definition devices.
In tests conducted by Apple, encoding HDV 1080i format video on the 3Ghz version Mac Pro was 1.3 times faster than on the Power Mac G5 Quad. For standard definition DV, the comparison was 1.4 times faster.
The Mac Pro can be configured in a myriad of ways, but a standard prebuilt configuration, including two 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, is $2,499. Apple also dropped the price on its 30-inch Cinema HD Display, with 2560-by-1600 pixel resolution, to $1,999. The 20-inch displays have also been reduced in price. All are available for immediate delivery.
Meanwhile, Avid Technology's video division said it will deliver new versions of its Xpress Pro and Media Composer NLE systems for the new Intel-based Macs by December. In September, after the new Mac Pro workstations begin to ship, Digidesign, Avid's audio division, will release a compatible update to its Pro Tools HD 7.2 software.