Rumors of the Mac Pro’s death have been making the rounds, and frankly that’s not surprising since Apple hasn’t released a new model since 2008. A new glimmer of hope has surfaced, however, as MIC Gadget reports that Apple may be preparing to release a new Mac Pro soon, packing Intel’s Ivy Bridge and a new NVidia Kepler graphics card.
The machines have supposedly faced overheating issues, which Apple has now been able to resolve with Ivy Bridge processors, which will run somewhat cooler than previous generation processors.
Well, we have some good news, Intel will be moving to its Ivy Bridge platform in April, and this will solve heating issues. How does it do that? Well, with its 22nm (extremely efficient) manufacturing process, it is very efficient in operation in comparison to the previous Sandy Bridge. More importantly, the old transistor types are gone, and replaced by “tri-gate” transistors. According to our sources, those transistors are 30%+ more efficient with heat dissipation.
Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors are set to debut in April, meaning an updated Mac Pro could be released shortly thereafter. Apple has reportedly already received engineering samples of 8-core Ivy Bridge processors to include in the machines.
NVidia’s next-gen Kepler graphics platform is due out around the same time, which could help Apple resolve issues with bugs and failures in the ATI graphics cards they have previously used in the Mac Pro.
… our sources within the company indicate that they have chosen to have Nvidia lead the charge so to speak on the graphics front. This is good for all our compatriots who want to use the special graphics engine in Adobe products, as it supports Nvidia only, or for those who wish to do CUDA based programs as well, again only supported by Nvidia.
The new models are reportedly expected to become available this fall after Apple has had a chance to fully test and debug.
