Not too long ago, one of the major narratives surrounding Apple was that the company had stopped caring about the Mac. With the iPhone accounting for the vast majority of Apple’s revenue, and with significant Mac updates nowhere to be found, the narrative struck a chord with many Mac users who were increasingly growing impatient with Apple’s seeming ambivalence towards the Mac.
Looking to right the ship and assure the Mac faithful that they have no reason to worry, Apple went on a media offensive this past April when it sent Apple executives to sit down with a handful of select journalists for something akin to a Mac roundtable. There, Apple said that a newly designed Mac Pro was in the works, along with significant updates to other Mac products. Just two months later, Apple unveiled the iMac Pro, a $4,999 beast of a machine that can be tricked out with 18 core Xeon processors.
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When announced, Apple said that the iMac Pro will begin shipping in December. Thankfully, there’s no evidence that the machine will be subject to any delays, with Digitimes reporting that Apple has already started placing orders with AMD for the machine.
While Apple has started to release more orders to AMD for high-end GPUs needed for new iMac series since September 2017, Taiwan-based outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies has stepped up 2.5D packaging for the GPUs, according to supply chain sources.
The new iMac series adopt GPUs supplied by AMD, with the super workstation-class 27-inch iMac Pro equipped with Radeon Pro Vega 56 GPU and 8GB HBM2 memory or Radeon Pro Vega 64 and 16GB HBM2 memory. The high-end GPUs are packaged using 2.5D technology while the general-spec GPUs use flip-chip packaging process.
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting a pro-level Mac for some time and simply don’t want to wait for a revamped Mac Pro, Apple’s forthcoming iMac Pro is definitely worth taking a look at. And in case you missed it last week, benchmarks suggest that the machine is going to be an absolute screamer.
