Intel have caused widespread confusion amongst expectant Apple iMac Pro customers, following an announcement that their new processors won’t actually be powerful enough for the new iMac Pro.
Apple’s upcoming new flagship iMac is set to be high-powered in the extreme, supposedly boasting up to 18 cores running at 4.5Ghz, up to 16GB RAM and 4TB of SSD storage.
Unfortunately, Intel’s new server-grade Xeon ‘Purley’ processor chips and specifically the fastest Intel Xeon Gold 6144 which will soon be available, can only reach a turbo-boosted 4.2Ghz at best.
This leaves Apple either falsely advertising the specifications of their upcoming new iMac Pro, or unable to build the device pending further developments. It’s unclear whether this was simply a miscommunication between Intel and Apple, or whether Intel have embarrassingly fallen short of some previous agreement during research and development.
The new iMac Pro isn’t actually due to be released until December 2017, so there’s still time for Apple to manoeuvre on the exact details of the Pro’s staggering specification.
The ‘Most Advanced Graphics ever’ includes the new Radeon Pro Vega GPU: able to handle all the next-generation 3D-rendering, virtual reality and machine learning tasks one would expect from a ground-breaking Apple device which will need to last several years of technological advancement – and justify a $4,999 (starting) price!
It appears that rather than replacing the existing cylindrical Mac Pro, the new ‘most powerful’ device in Apple’s range will simply combine the 5k retina display as part of the iMac Pro package, perhaps correctly reasoning that the space-grey behemoth will already be the reserve of premium customers.
Apple remains particularly strong within the creative sector, and the new iMac Pro almost looks like a gauntlet, thrown down in challenge to the most processor-demanding architects, animators or video-editors to do their worst.
Once it can actually be assembled that is.
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