Mac Pro (Early 2009)

Notes

Architecture Details

• CPU: 64-bit
• EFI: 64-bit
• Graphics: 64-bit

OS Support:

• Shipped: Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6
• Maximum: Current OS X
• Windows: XP, Vista, 7 (32/64), 8 (64)

History:
Another year rolls past, and Apple almost completely retools the Mac Pro for the '09 installment (March). Outside, the familiar look, except that the iconic FireWire 400 ports have been replaced with FireWire 800, continuing the across-the-board shift away from the decade-old standby. Mini DisplayPort is now also standard, brought over from Apple's notebooks and capable of supporting a wider variety of monitor types and resolutions.

But inside, the shift is far more dramatic. Apple switched its units over to Intel's "Nehalem" [neh-HAY-lem, after a major river in Oregon, USA] platform. The new architecture brings with it a few major improvements: first, the frontside bus is replaced by QuickPath Interconnect, a high-bandwidth, multiple-lane in-processor bus capable of data transfers at rates many times faster than was possible using a dedicated northbridge as in previous models; second, the return of Hyper-Threading meant that each core could perform the work of two given proper conditions; and third, Turbo Boost technology allowed for inactive processor cores to be shut down while at the same time increasing the overall clock rate of active cores, giving the effect of improved performance.

The change in technology also allowed Apple to part with fully-buffered RAM that, while a solid concept in its day, may have put off upgrade-happy pros concerned with its expense and the scarcity of Apple-qualified RAM (which had a nonstandard heat spreader). In its place came unbuffered DDR3 ECC RAM at 1066 MT/s, installed by default in a triple-channel setup.

Apple further reworked the Pro by replacing the remaining PCIe v1.0 slots with v2.0 slots. Optical drive speed of the standard device doubled, and Bluetooth-equipped models received a bump to v2.1 of the spec.

Other:

• Maximum RAM varies by configuration; dual-processor models support up to 32 GB; single-processor models, 16 GB
• This is the earliest tower series to support Windows 8