Mac Pro gets stealthy, minor update

Although not discussed during the WWDC keynote and not mentioned in Apple’s published press materials for the show, the venerable Mac Pro got a minor refresh on Monday. A 12-core configuration is now standard.

The Mac Pro’s standard configuration now includes two 2.4 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5645 processors, replacing the quad-core E5620 processors it had previously. Speed hasn’t increased, and they still sport 12MB of L3 cache per processor. The quad-core configuration now features a 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W3565 processor, replacing the W3530 processor in the previous configuration.

Connections remain identical – four FireWire 800 ports, five USB 2.0 ports, front panel headphone minijack and internal speaker, optical digital audio input and output TOSLINK ports, analog stereo line-level input and output minijacks, and multichannel audio support through Mini DisplayPort.

Graphics on the refreshed Mac Pro are the same – ATI Radeon HD 5770 or 5870 cards are standard issue. Memory is a bit faster on the dual processor system – 1333 MHz DDR3 instead of 1066 MHz DDR 3.