Rumor: Mac Pro refresh on the horizon with NVIDIA and Ivy Bridge

Unsurprisingly, more rumors are surfacing about the long overdue refresh to the Mac Pro. Steve Lo over at M.I.C. Gadget is reporting that not only will we see Ivy Bridge, but we’ll see NVIDIA graphics cards in there as well.

Intel will be moving to its Ivy Bridge platform in April, and this will solve heating issues. How does it do that? Well, with its 22nm (extremely efficient) manufacturing process, it is very efficient in operation in comparison to the previous Sandy Bridge. More importantly, the old transistor types are gone, and replaced by “tri-gate” transistors. According to our sources, those transistors are 30%+ more efficient with heat dissipation.

In addition, this rumor has the total number of cores per processor going up from six to eight. That’s right, folks. We could be seeing a dual processor, sixteen core Mac Pro this year. At this point, our old days of non-parallel processing seem incredibly quaint. How long until we can buy a machine with a three-digit number of cores? Thanks to Moore’s law, it might be sooner than you think.

Nvidia has their “Kepler” platform due out around the same time as Intel is making their changes, and our sources within the company indicate that they have chosen to have Nvidia lead the charge so to speak on the graphics front.

As it stands, all Macs now ship with either AMD graphics or Intel’s integrated graphics. Over the past few years, Apple has gone back and forth between ATI/AMD and NVIDIA. Tim Cook is highly skilled at supply chain management, so rest assured any switch is going to be for the betterment of Apple and its unit production.

Are you excited to see a new Mac Pro in Apple’s line up? Are you aching for a refresh? Hit us up on Twitter so we can hear what you think about this rumor. Our username is @macgasm, and we love to talk to readers.

Source: M.I.C. Gadget

Grant is a writer from Delaware. In his spare time, Grant maintains a personal blog, hosts The Weekly Roar, hosts Quadcast, and writes for video games.