Mac Pro Eyes 3.2GHz Intel Xeons


The Inquirer reports that Intel's Penryn Xeons are being earmarked for Apple's next Mac Pros. These desktop chips will run at 3.2GHz or 3.33GHz. But Intel hasn't had the incentive to produce bucketloads of Penryns above 2.6GHz, as they pretty much already hold a speed advantage over AMD.

Penryn is a 45nm process chip that does extreme games very well, but, more importantly, its video encoding performance can be up to 40% better than existing dual-core processors. It can accommodate up to 6MB of L2 cache - per processor die. But, better still, it's optimized for virtualization, which opens the door to even better virtual Windows performance on the Intel Macs.

Mac Pro and MacBook users won't be left in the cold; the Penryn family will come to laptops as well, with lower power draws, better cooling and deep power down which surpasses current dual-core tech.

But Apple has apparently pre-booked the high-end Penryns, leaving the off-cuts (i.e., sub-3.0GHz Penryns) to the white box brigade and multicolor box maker Dell. Apple will reportedly pay a premium for being first on the block.

These Xeons will be the ultimate desktop processors for running resource-hungry applications, like Photoshop and Final Cut. Penryn is expected to launch on November 11.

A Penryn-equipped Mac Pro sure would look nice under your Xmas tree, wouldn't it?