Yesterday we told you that Apple is getting ready to breathe life into the Mac Pro at WWDC next week, and today more specs for the upcoming machine have been allegedly revealed. It’s been nearly two years since Apple introduced a new Mac Pro, and there are plenty of internal upgrades that need to be made for it to be considered a computer that meets professional standards.

Apple will finally bring its Thunderbolt I/O architecture to the Mac Pro this year, as well as some other major improvements.

Chinese site M.I.C. Gadget says it has all the details on the new Mac Pro, according to “field experts” that have talked to industry sources:

Here is the official word: SATA III/SAS connectivity is now native, which is always good for solid state drives. We expect Apple to be offering solid state drives as they are now, but with the fact being, that the SATA II is no longer a bottleneck. For boot drives, very good news, at 6GB/s. Expect PCIE3 to be native as well. For your RAID arrays, video cards (professional or otherwise) this will be better than PCIE2 for scaling, though not better for performance in all cases. Also expect up to 40 lanes per socket, rather than the usual 36 of the previous generation.

Other major improvements are Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 and Intel Xeon E5 series processors. Apple won’t use Ivy Bridge processors because they “handle voltage far worse than their 32nm Sandy bridge brethren.” Unlike the new MacBook Pro that is expected to run on Ivy Bridge, high-end computers run fairly high voltages, and the machines needs to handle voltage efficiently to remain operational for a long time.

The new Mac Pro’s onboard memory controller has been moved to the CPU, and it’s possible that Apple could offer octa-core CUPs for a higher cost. According to M.I.C. Gadget, memory will be upgraded from 1333mhz to 1600 mhz. The machine will allegedly allow for 25% more memory with 8 physical memory lanes.

M.I.C. Gadget does not believe that Apple will release a new rack-mountable Mac Pro, noting that “Apple does not wish to be present in the enterprise market as the units sell very poorly in comparison to the other products they sell.” We would have to agree.

Stay tuned to see what Apple announces at WWDC next week!

Source: M.I.C. Gadget