No show on new Mac Pro yet

Not all rumors pan out, see my March 5 entry. Maybe the iPad helped delayed things? Or maybe things are a week away or a month away, it’s hard to say. After all, Apple fires leaks.

What this means is unclear, but Apple certainly has many CPUs to choose from, which means we could see anything from a single-CPU quad-core CPU at 3.46GHz to a dual-CPU 12-core at 3.33GHz, and other possible flavors as well. HardMac has a nice table summarizing the CPU possibilities.

The interesting question is whether the fastest CPUs will be used, because they draw up to 130 watt each, which raises power dissipation issues as well as being very expensive even as parts by themselves.

Remember, when the new models do become available, there will be some nice discounts on older stock, so the actual performance gains are worth understanding, something I intend to investigate thoroughly, especially for a variety of photo application.

My guess is that we’ll see ~15% gains at the same clock speed, but running at 3.33Ghz vs 2.66GHz is a 25% bump (best case, disk I/O and memory are also involved).