The new Mac Pros

Looking at the specs on the new Mac Pros, nice to see the "grunt" factor rolling inexorably forward.

The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon 5400 processors running up to 3.2 GHz, new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage. The Mac Pro features 12MB of L2 cache per processor, dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses and up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory. According to Apple, the new Mac Pro achieves a 61 percent increase in memory throughput. The systems also include a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, the company said.

Up to this point, all good. But from that point on it starts to get into science fiction territory:

With the new PCI Express, the Mac Pro supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

1.5 Gigabytes of video memory? That’s almost as much main memory as I have on this iMac (where I have 2GB). But that’s not the end of it… This last sentence is just insane:

With support for up to four graphics cards, the new Mac Pro can drive up to eight 30-inch displays at once for advanced visualization and large display walls.

Hard to imagine that number of pixels. Up til now performance gains in Apple’s pro lines have always been something desirable. This goes beyond desirable into the "couldn’t possibly take advantage of this capability in a million years" zone, at least for me.