The annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is currently underway at the San Jose Convention Center in California. As is the norm for the WWDC, the opening keynote is what catches everyone’s eyes and this year’s is not different. One of the biggest reveals was a new iMac but it isn’t a run-of-the-mill device. Instead, Apple unveiled their most powerful iMac yet, dubbing it the iMac Pro.
The iMac Pro features a crystal clear 27-inch Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation thanks to the Radeon Pro Vega GPU. As a result, it currently bears the title of being the most powerful Mac ever made. Why you might ask, is Apple trying to sell you what appears to be a nuclear power station in disguise? To be honest, Apple isn’t targeting most of its customers; the iMac Pro is designed for machine learning, virtual reality content creation, advanced graphics editing and real-time 3D rendering. It is not solely designed for browsing cooking recipes on.
“We’re thrilled to give developers and customers a sneak peek at iMac Pro. This will be our fastest and most powerful Mac ever, which brings workstation-class computing to iMac for the first time. We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”
– John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering.
Featuring next-generation Intel Xeon processors up to 18 cores, iMac Pro is designed to handle the most demanding pro workflows. With an all-flash architecture and all-new thermal design, iMac Pro delivers up to 80 percent more cooling capacity in the same thin and seamless iMac design. And with a new space grey enclosure and gorgeous 27-inch Retina 5K display with support for 1 billion colours, iMac Pro is as stunning as it is powerful.
Furthermore, the iMac Pro comes with the new Radeon Pro Vega GPU, the most advanced graphics ever in a Mac. Featuring a new, next-generation compute core and up to 16GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), the iMac Pro with the Vega GPU delivers up to an amazing 11 Teraflops of single-precision compute power for real-time 3D rendering and immersive, high frame rate VR. And for half-precision computation, ideal for machine learning, iMac Pro delivers up to an incredible 22 Teraflops of performance.
Consumers needn’t worry about running out of space or excruciatingly long transfer times as the iMac Pro also supports up to 4TB of SSD and up to 128GB of ECC memory, and with four Thunderbolt 3 ports can connect to up to two high-performance RAID arrays and two 5K displays at the same time. For the first time ever on a Mac, the new machine also features 10Gb Ethernet for up to 10 times faster networking.
In addition to the new the powerful machine, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest-end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display.
The iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December with a price tag of $4,999.
