Apple Introduces the 8-Core Mac Pro

• April 4th, 2007
• Joseph Crawford
• 8:39 AM (GMT-5)
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If you have been keeping up with things when it comes to Apple products you might have expected this was coming. The new 8-core system takes advantage of 2 quad core Xeons which are named “Clovertown”. This is going to be a real monster of a machine. I currently have the quad-core 2.66 gHz Mac Pro with 4gb of ram and I am quite content.

As you can imagine the base price increases by about $1500 when you customize to the new 8-core system. The base price for a quad 2.66 is $2499, now if you jump that to the 2 quad core chips you are looking at a price tag of $3997 just for the base system. If you want to add more ram well the cost will increase.

I think that is still quite expensive and will wait several months to watch the price fall a little bit. It does make you wonder though if you can just throw a few Clovertown chips into a current Mac Pro which has the 2.66 dual cores. I know I have seen it done online but it brings up the question of whether or not there is different hardware in the 8-core system. Did Apple have to add or change anything to make it run 100% smooth with the quad core processors?