Apple on Tuesday started sales of its revamped Mac Pro workstation. The new Mac Pro brings Apple back to the forefront of expensive, high-performance workstations for the first time in years. The company also began sales of its new Pro Display XDR, the company’s first high-end monitor in a long time.

The Apple Mac Pro workstation are powered by Intel’s Xeon W processors, with options ranging from eight to 28 cores. Memory options similarly span a wide range, all the way from 32 GB to 1.5 TB of DDR4-2933 memory. Meanwhile the machine's storage, which all solid-state and backed by Apple's T2 controller, is available today from 256 GB to 4 TB, and Apple has already announced that an 8TB option is coming soon.

As for the graphics side of things, the Mac Pro starts with AMD's Radeon Pro 580X. Upgrade options include the newer Radeon Pro W5700X – roughly equivalent to AMD’s recently launched Radeon Pro W5700 – and the top option is up to two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards in MPX form-factor. The latter offers a total of 16384 stream processors (4096 SPs per GPU), 128 GB of HBM2 memory (32 GB per GPU), and eight display outputs.

Since the Mac Pro machine is aimed at professionals from the movie and adjacent industries, they can be equipped with Apple’s Afterburner FPGA-based accelerator card. All told, the workstation has multiple PCIe 3.0 slots and a 1.4 kW PSU, so the new Mac Pro can be expanded quite significantly.

The base price of Apple’s new Mac Pro tower with an eight-core CPU is $5,999, but a system with maxed out specifications is priced at a whopping $53,247.98.

In addition to the new workstation, Apple also started to sell its exclusive 32-inch Pro Display XDR monitor. The (ed: breathtaking) display uses a 10-bit IPS panel and offers a 6016×3384 resolution, 1,000 nits – 1,600 nits brightness (sustained/peak), and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio because of Mini-LED backlighting. The standard model of the display costs $4,999, but an anti-reflective version with nano-texture glass carries a $5,999 MSRP. Infamously, the monitor doesn't come with a stand or VESA mount adapter, and these have to be purchased separately for $999 and $199, respectively.

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Sources: Apple

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  • schujj07 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link

    While Threadripper is faster than Xeon W, it doesn't have the same amount of RAM support. The standard W-32XX supports 1TB RAM and the 32XXM supports 2TB RAM. Since Threadripper doesn't support RDIMMs, it can only use 256GB RAM. What AMD should do is create a Xeon W competitor with Epyc that is basically Threadripper with 8 RAM channels and RDIMM support.
  • Topweasel - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link

    Then since they are already designing new boards and such, it wouldn't have been to hard to create a Workstation board for 1S Epyc, which would have been faster, and have allowance for even higher core counts and memory.
  • Zizy - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link

    It isn't officially supported but I believe it should run, iirc it did on TR1.
    Anway, you have Epyc P CPUs that would be mostly suitable for that. Same money, tons of memory and performance.
  • fred666 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link

    Epyc support up to 2 TB RAM. You can get a single socket Epyc system for much less than this Mac.
    https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-mbd-h11dsi-n702-...

    You might need to go dual socket to get 2 TB RAM support however, since you would need 16 RAM slots and not sure it's available on a 1 socket motherboard.

    https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-mbd-h11dsi-n702-...
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    No AMD = no buy
  • svan1971 - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    $53K ? Put me in for 2, I'm sure my workflow will increase 10 fold and they will pay for themselves in 20 years.
  • schujj07 - Wednesday, December 11, 2019 - link

    My company just bought a SuperMicro 2U4N with each node having 2x Epyc 7502's, 1TB RAM, and dual dual-port 25GbE cards for $44k. We did spend another $12k on almost 80TB of SSD, so for only and extra $3k you could have what we got.
  • airdrifting - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    Yeah $1000 monitor stand, no thanks and fu apple.
  • Papaspud - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    When money is no object and you don't care if you have the best....... we present apple!!!!
  • rahvin - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    Those Xeon W's are not "the best". They are overpriced monstrosities that are often outperformed by consumer level Ryzen processors at 1/8th the cost.

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