With the current Mac Pro getting long in the tooth, and potential upgraders getting more and more skittish about where the Mac Pro is heading in the future, there’s been a lot of speculating about whether the professional level Mac from Apple is getting killed off, or if Apple’s just waiting for some new fancy chips to hit the market before releasing an update. News from the Inquirer suggests that it could be the latter more than the former at this point.
Rumor has it that Intel’s Xeon E5 chip is already in the channel, despite not being publicly announced, and ModMyi suggests that Apple “is likely to take advantage of the 6-core and 8-coore E5 2600 series chips for its dual-processor Mac Pro configurations while focusing on the quad-core and 6-core E5-1600 chips for its lower-end single-processor models.”
The article is based on news from the Inquirer, who was able to have a first-hand look at the new 2011 Xeon E5 chips, also known as Sandy Bridge E, in a Boston lab.
If you’re holding out, this may be just the news you need to keep your finger off the trigger and avoid purchasing a suped up iMac with Thunderbolt. Something tells us there may be just a little bit of life left in the awesome Mac Pro, even if it’s only for a couple more years. Just a hunch.
