Here are the rough specs of the Mac Pro prototype that we first saw mid-month in a ?batphone? stream from sources on the West Coast, and more recently had several of our East Coast reporters play with hands-on during a source meeting in New York City this week:
*2.8, 2.93, and 3.2GHz Core i7 Xeon 5500-series ?Gainestown? processors with 8MB of L2 cache; previous models had 12MB of L2 per chip but due to Nehalem improvements, new L2 actually performs better ? and the reduced amount improves cost, manfacturing yields, power/heat dissipation, et cetera.
*All versions dual-chip/dual Front Side Bus based; 2.93 and 3.2GHz models available with either quad or eight-core chips creating a total of eight or sixteen(!!!) cores.
*Nehalem re-introduces Intel?s HyperTransport technology which processes two threads on each core ? causing the OS to see 16 or 32 ?logical cores,? respectively.
*Triple DDR3-1333 (!) SDRAM memory busses, forcing memory to be installed in sets of three DIMMs, but offering upwards of 4.8 billion transfers per second through Nehalem ?QuickPath Interconnect? which is a more than 60% boost over the closest alternative DDR3-1066 based design currently on the market.
*There has been some question as to whether Core i7 Xeon supports ECC (error correction/control) FB-DIMMs which have been in the past several models of Mac Pro; the other Core i7 chips do not.