Apple unveils powerful, Mac Pro and groundbreaking Pro Display XDR

Apple today introduced the all-new Mac Pro, a completely redesigned, a breakthrough workstation for pros who push the limits of what a Mac can do, and unveiled Apple Pro Display XDR, the world’s best pro display. Designed for maximum performance, expansion and configurability, the all-new Mac Pro features workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world’s most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, a game-changing accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously. 

Pro Display XDR features a massive 32-inch Retina 6K display with gorgeous P3 wide and 10-bit colour, an extreme 1,600 nits of peak brightness, an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle, all at a breakthrough price point. Together, the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR are the most powerful tools Apple has ever put in the hands of pro customers and will change pro workflows forever.

Tremendous Processor Power and Massive Bandwidth

Designed for customers who demand the ultimate in CPU performance — for workflows like production rendering, playing hundreds of virtual instruments or simulating an app on a dozen iOS devices at once — Mac Pro features powerful Xeon processors up to 28 cores, with 64 PCI Express lanes for tremendous performance and massive bandwidth. It also provides over 300W of power along with a state-of-the-art thermal architecture to allow the processor to run fully unconstrained all the time.

Enormous Memory Capacity and Expansion

For pros working with the largest projects, analysing huge data sets or running multiple pro applications, Mac Pro provides enormous memory capacity to meet needs as they grow. Featuring a six-channel memory architecture and 12 physical DIMM slots, the new Mac Pro allows for a massive 1.5TB of memory, the most ever available in a Mac. And with eight PCI Express expansion slots, which is twice that of the previous-generation Mac Pro tower, pros can customise and expand their system in ways never before possible in a single workstation.

World’s Most Powerful Graphics Architecture

For pros animating 3D film assets, compositing 8K scenes and building complex 3D environments, graphics performance is more important than ever. That is why Mac Pro features the world’s most powerful graphics card and up to 56 teraflops of graphics performance in a single system. Its groundbreaking graphics expansion architecture, the Apple MPX Module, features Thunderbolt integration and over 500W of power, both firsts for any graphics card. And for super quiet operation, the MPX Module is cooled by the Mac Pro system thermals.

Mac Pro graphics options start with the Radeon Pro 580X. Mac Pro debuts the Radeon Pro Vega II, featuring up to 14 teraflops of compute performance and 32GB of memory with 1TB/s of memory bandwidth, the highest of any GPU. Mac Pro also introduces Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, which features two Vega II GPUs for an incredible 28 teraflops of graphics performance and 64GB of memory, making it the world’s most powerful graphics card. Mac Pro can accommodate two MPX Modules so customers can use two Vega II Duos for a staggering 56 teraflops of graphics performance and 128GB of video memory.

Introducing Apple Afterburner, a Game-Changing Accelerator Card

The new Mac Pro debuts Afterburner, featuring a programmable ASIC capable of decoding up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. With Afterburner, video editors using high-quality cameras that require the conversion of native file formats into proxies for easy editing can now use native formats right from the camera and decode up to three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video and 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video in real time,1 virtually eliminating proxy workflows.

Stunning Modular Enclosure with 360-Degree Access

The design of the new Mac Pro starts with a stainless-steel space frame with an aluminium housing that lifts off for 360-degree access to the entire system. The frame provides a foundation for modularity and flexibility and incorporates smooth handles for easily moving Mac Pro around the studio. The housing also features a stunning lattice pattern to maximise airflow and quiet operation. For customers who want to rack mount their Mac Pro in edit bays or machine rooms, an optimised version for rack deployment will be available this fall. 

Performance to Transform the Pro Workflow

With up to 28 core Xeon processors, 56 teraflops of graphics performance and the groundbreaking Afterburner card, the new Mac Pro delivers performance that will transform pro workflows. A number of pro app developers are seeing amazing results that have never been possible in a single workstation. 

• Blackmagic Design brings full CPU and multi-GPU accelerated 8K real-time editing, effects and colour correction in ProRes 4444 for the first time on any system.
• Avid can enable support for up to six HDX cards, resulting in more IO, increased voice count and two times the real-time DSP processing than any other system can achieve in Pro Tools.
• Maxon’s Cinema 4D is seeing 20 per cent faster GPU render performance when compared to a Windows workstation maxed out with three NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards.