Today Apple announced a dramatic update to both of its professional Macs based on Intel’s high-end Xeon processors; bringing the Mac Pro and Xserve into the 45-nanometer era (all previous Intel Macs are based on 65nm technology; the PowerPC 970 “G5 was 90nm)” and offering up to twice the performance of previous models.

A lot has changed in the new Mac Pro…..but not everything the grapevine had been hoping for has arrived just yet.

Today’s update to the Mac Pro and Xserve is without a doubt one of the most anticipated of the past several months, and the numbers bear it out: 20% faster CPU-to-northbridge (Front Side Bus) bandwidth thanks to dual 1.6GHz FSBs, and memory bandwidth is now up to 1.6X faster as dual-channel DDR2-800 ECC FB-SDRAM (up from 667MHz) and an improved memory controller flex their muscles.

The standard package also receives a dramatic upgrade in the graphics department, moving from the previous nVIDIA GeForce 7300GT to the new and powerful ATi Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB card on a PCI Express 2.0 bus which offers a considerably faster pipe for not only the primary graphics card but all five PCIe-2.0 slots in the new Mac Pro. Adding a second Radeon HD 2600XT is only $150 more…..quite a steal when one considers that Other World Computing is still selling the 8X AGP based Radeon X850 XT 256MB card for the first/second-generation PowerMac G5 for $355 USD…..

There is still an entry-level model for both the Mac Pro and Xserve which has “only” four cores, but unlike the previous generation this means a single quad-core Harpertown chip rather than two dual-core Xeons; that entails giving up the second 1.6GHz Front Side Bus and half of the CPU-to-Northbridge bandwidth available on the octo-core models. Generally, most Mac Pro and even Xserve buyers will want to stick with the “standard” 2.8GHz octo-core model.