Mac OS 10.5.2, Mac Pro Update At Macworld?

As many of our readers requested additional information regarding the date for the launch of the future Mac Pro, we decided to ask our sources for details. Of course, we could not cross confirm all information, but we know that they should be reliable:

Unlike our expectations, one will have to wait for MWSF keynote on January 15th to have Steve jobs announcing the transition to Penryn processors, the Mac Pro being the first. reasons for this delay are numerous, but we were reporting yesterday about some of them:

- Apple is actively working on Leopard to benefit as much as possible from the recently released Intel Mac OS X compiler and libraries, including SSE4 support. Mac OS X 10.5.2 should be released for the keynote and fully takes advantages of the last Intel compiler and libraries. According to our sources, it should be the largest and most important intermediate system update ever released by Apple.
- the new Mac Pro will be immediately available after the Keynote, and the hardware specifications should be as follow:
* 8 Core Xeon Penryn for all (3.2GHz for the high-end model)
* new graphic cards should be available, among them the latest Quadro FX from NVidia
* Apple should offer Blu-ray burner as BTO

Apple should also rename DVD Studio Pro, as the January expected update should bring support for playing and burning BD media; the name could be Disk Studio Pro.

Regarding Penryn-based iMac or MacBook Pro, dates of availability remain unclear, if they are announced in January, they should not be immediately available, as the mobile Penryn CPUs should not be officially available priori January 7th.

Last but not least: the last Intel compiler bringing SSE4 support is also compatible with Itanium CPU, which are the high-end Intel server CPUs. According to our sources, Apple might be launching a series of Xserve "Ultra" powered by Itanium 2 in a near future.

The current 8-core option on Mac Pros is such a hefty premium, including 8 core as standard is surely going to hike the price up quite a bit?

Any thoughts on ram prices for Peryns?

I bought mac pro ram when it was new and $$$$.

But now mac pro ram is dirt cheap.

Have you heard anything about Peryn ram prices?

thanks.

That's pretty close.

There were rumors floating around that it might require different ram for more money too. There was also another rumor that it will still take the current ram it now uses, but won't work at its fullest.