Mac Pro (Early 2009)

The Early 2009 Mac Pro moved to Nehalem, which was the most significant thing Intel did to its processors that decade. Xeon 5500 Gainestown chips, four or eight cores depending on whether you bought one processor or two, from 2.26 to 2.93GHz. The architecture put the memory controller on the chip and replaced the front-side bus with QuickPath Interconnect, which cut memory latency sharply, and added Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost on top. The practical effect was that clock speeds stopped being comparable. This machine beat the 2008 Harpertown Mac Pro substantially on real work while sometimes showing a lower number on the box. Editors, visual effects artists, audio engineers and scientific users noticed immediately in rendering, encoding and anything running many things at once. The tower did not change. Same cheese-grater aluminum, same tool-free bays, same PCI Express slots, all of which is why IT departments liked it and why people upgraded these machines for years instead of replacing them. Reviewers ranked it among the fastest workstations anyone sold. The standing complaints were Apple's RAM prices and what a fully configured one cost, neither of which was new.