At its WWDC23 event, Apple announced a new Mac Pro featuring its own Arm-powered silicon.
The first update to the Mac Pro line in four years, the new system will be rack-mountable.
The system features Apple's proprietary M2 Ultra chip, which the company claims is 40 percent faster performance than M1 Ultra. M2 Ultra features 800GBps of system memory bandwidth and can be configured with 192GB of unified memory. The Utra is two M2 Max dies connected through UltraFusion, Apple’s custom-built packaging technology.
It also has eight Thunderbolt ports, six PCIe Gen 4 slots, and dual 10GB Ethernet ports. It can be configured with up to a 76-core GPU.
The 'entry' Mac Pro costs $6,999, but when Apple introduced a rack-mountable version of its old Pro it added another $500 to the price.
Way back in 2002, Apple used to have its own server business, Xserve, but it was discontinued in 2011 after failing to gain significant market share.
Since then, companies like MacStadium have sprouted to offer access to bespoke data centers filled with Macs for developers seeking to test Mac and iOS code.
