Mac Pro is the latest monster in Apple’s Mac family, equipped with dual Xeon CPU’s with two cores each, has Mac Pro owners a lot of calculating power in their computers with four physical cores. The fact that Apple nowadays uses Intel’s platform which is a lot bigger then that of IBM’s PowerPC, means that even upgrades are a lot easier to do than before. At Anandtech they’ve compiled an article covering the Mac Pro’s upgrade capabilities, covering everything from memory upgrades to CPU upgrades.
When it came to upgrading the CPU, Anandtech exchanged the CPU’s from two Xeon 5130 operating at 2.0GHz to two Xeon 5160’s operating at 3.0GHz. The exchange worked flawlessly which shows us that one no longer has to go through Apple to upgrade ones computer.
However the most interesting exchange was when Anandtech threw in two pin compatible – same pin configuration and socket – Clovertown CPU’s. Clovertown is Intel’s first Quad core CPU for the Xeon market and it’s scheduled to be launched later this year. Support for the CPU seems to already be implemented in the Mac Pro, as it didn’t complain at all when Anandtech booted it up. This is a screen from the computer, and it sure is impressive.
Picture source: Anandtech
The result is a Apple Mac Pro with eight cores which is truly impressive, this might also be the first time this is done outside of Intel’s or Apple’s labs. So it shouldn’t be a problem investing in a Mac Pro today and upgrade later when Clovertown’s released to us mortals. Read the entire article over at Anandtech.
