Apple is the first manufacturer to launch a computer with Intel’s new Nehalem chips

Apple is the first manufacturer to launch a computer with Intel's new Nehalem chips

In addition to being the first Mac using the new Nehalem processors, the recently announced Mac Pro is also the first professional computer to use chips developed with the latest technologies from Intel, in front of all its competitors. In fact, this has been happening since 2006, when the first Apple computers with Core Duo chips came onto the market. Like them at that time, the new Xeon that go inside each Mac Pro were not even officially launched by Intel.

Mac Pro with LED Cinema Display

On the page for the new Mac Pro on the Apple website, it details the main new features of this processor, before Intel itself. Several of them are noteworthy: for starters, its construction offers a 64-bit architecture with easy access to cached data and integrated memory control, making the total system bandwidth even faster, in addition to contributing to the performance of compiled applications. for 64 bits.

Another interesting feature of these processors is the so-called «Turbo Boost», which gives it the ability to automatically «turn off» the cores of the chips that are not being used in a given task. Thus, it increases the speed beyond its maximum frequency, which can reach 3.33 GHz in a 2.93 GHz Xeon processor. This is a very good thing for running applications that are not able to manage the processor cores efficiently – something that will be preached by Apple when launching Mac OS X Snow Leopard – but it causes more energy consumption.

Finally, this is the first Xeon processor to supportHyper-Threading, which makes Mac Pro capable of running up to 16 virtual processing cores through Mac OS X. Virtualization programs will be the main beneficiaries when these new machines are available for purchase: an example of them is VMware Fusion, which brings internal technologies able to take advantage of this type of technology.

All these news are very good, but what everyone is really waiting for is the benchmark tests with the new machine, since those released by Apple are still commercial parts. For sure, the results will be much better than those of the iMac and Mac mini.