“Apple’s new Mac Pro represents a bit of a coup for the company. Apple got to announce a workstation based on Intel’s Xeon 3500 and 5500 chip lines before the processors were even launched. They’re formally announced towards the end of this month and this is when we expect other workstation vendors to debut their models based on the chips,” Neil Bennett reports for Digital Arts.
“‘Nehalem’ represents one of the largest redesigns in the core architecture of how a PC’s processor, RAM and other components communicate ever,” Bennett reports. “The review unit supplied to us by Apple has two 2.26GHz chips. All of the Xeon 3500 and 5500 series chips have four processor cores to massively boost the performance of multi-threaded applications (including most major creative tools).”
“‘Nehalem’ also sees the reintroduction of Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, which runs two processes on each chip core, so Mac OS X thinks it has twice the number of cores it actually has — which our tests have show give you up to a 10 per cent performance boost. Most mainstream creative tools don’t support more than eight processor cores currently – so if their developers add support in future updates or releases, the new Mac Pro will only get faster,” Bennett reports.
“Our Cinebench R10 rendering test puts the processors through their paces — it doesn’t rely on RAM or disk performance at all. The 2.26GHz 8-Core Mac Pro attained a score of 19,689, which is 6.28x what a single processor core would create. This is 12 per cent faster than the previous base dual-chip Mac Pro, which had two 2.8GHz quad-core X5462 chips,” Bennett reports. “The ‘Nehalem’ Mac Pro is an obvious upgrade choice for current Mac-based creative pros — though we’ll have to wait until early April to see how it measures up against Windows-based competitors.”
Full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: Neil, have fun trying to run Final Cut Pro on those Windows-based “competitors.” 
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
