Today, Apple released two small updates to their Mac Pro professional workstation: new 3.33GHz Intel Xeons and the BTO option for 2TB hard drives. The release of a Mac Pro with 3.33GHz Xeon W5590 processors has been rumored ever since a Mac Pro with two of them posted one of the biggest GeekBench scores ever. It was remarked that someone could have replaced the standard Mac Pro LGA1366 socket processors with aftermarket ones, which is perfectly possible due to Apple using standard, replaceable processors in its Mac Pro, Xserve and now iMac (LGA775 for Core 2, LGA 1156 for i5/i7), but the score posted indicated that it had a new firmware version. The Nehalem-based processors used in the Mac Pro since the 3rd of March, 2009, are designed to work with many more cores at lower clock speeds for the same price. They also reintroduce HyperThreading to full-size chips after it was dropped due to the transition from NetBurst (Pentium 4) to P6 (Pentium M) and then Yonah (Core) and Core (Core 2), after it was reintroduced to the Intel Atom Diamondville and Silverthorne processors for netbooks, nettops and MIDs.
The BTO option also allows for 6TB RAID 5 arrays to be built without ever opening the computer, which is ironically very easy for a computer with little expandability other than HDDs, memory and PCI-E cards.
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