Apple has begun taking orders for the new Mac Pro announced last month. It has up to 12 processing cores and purportedly up to 50% greater performance than the previous generation.

The new Mac Pro features the latest quad-core and six-core Intel Xeon processors, all-new ATI graphics and the option for up to four 512GB solid state drives (SSD). At the heart of the new Mac Pro’s performance are next generation quad-core and six-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds up to 3.33 GHz. These multi-core processors use a single die design so each core can share up to 12MB L3 cache to improve efficiency while increasing processing speed.

These systems feature an integrated memory controller for faster memory bandwidth and reduced memory latency; Turbo Boost to dynamically boost processor speeds up to 3.6GHz; and Hyper-Threading to create up to 24 virtual cores. The Mac Pro now comes with the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory and customers can configure-to-order the even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB of memory.

For the first time, Mac Pro customers have the option to order a 512GB SSD. With the ability to install up to four SSD drives in the system's internal drive bays, the new Mac Pro can provide ultra high-speed disk bandwidth and random disk performance, two times faster than the average performance of a standard disk drive.

The new quad-core Mac Pro has a suggested retail price of $2,499. The new 8-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $3,499.