Apple has announced that sales of its previously announced iMac Pro all-in-one workstations will start on Thursday, December 14. On that day, the company is expected to make its new systems available at least in some retail locations as well as through its website. Initially, Apple is expected to release iMac Pro workstations with eight- and ten-core processors, whereas the higher-end models featuring CPUs with up to 18 cores will hit the market in early 2018.

Apple’s iMac Pro AIO workstations are aimed at professional users with demanding workloads, such as video editing, 3D animation, scientific research, software development, and other. To a large degree, the iMac Pro addresses the same crowd as the Mac Pro introduced four years ago (and never updated since then) and offers them to buy a 27” AIO featuring modern multi-core CPUs, up-to-date GPUs, loads of RAM, plenty of solid-state storage and advanced connectivity that includes four Thunderbolt 3 ports and one 10 GbE header. The company is still working on an all new desktop computer that will replace the Mac Pro sometimes in 2018, but for a while the new iMac Pro will be Apple’s most powerful PCs.

The Apple iMac Pro comes in aluminum space gray chassis and is outfitted with a 27” display panel with a 5120x2880 resolution, up to 500 nits brightness that supports the DCI-P3 color gamut and 10-bit spatial and temporal dithering (no word on HDR10 support though). Since many professional workloads require more than one monitors, Apple proposes to use two out of four Thunderbolt 3 ports to connect two additional 5K displays (such as LG’s UltraFine 5K launched a year ago).

Inside, the iMac Pro more resembles a high-end desktop rather than a AIO machine. The system is based on Intel’s Xeon W processors with eight, ten, 14 or 18 cores and up to 42 MB of L2+L3 cache. The 14-core iMac Pro was not a part of Apple’s original announcement, but a blogger was told by Apple that the fourth iMac Pro SKU would be available as well. Apple does not disclose exact CPU models that it intends to use with the iMac Pro, but it looks like we are dealing with off-the-shelf Xeon W CPUs with up to 140 W TDP.

By default, an entry-level iMac Pro is to be equipped with 32 GB of DDR4-2666 ECC memory, but it is expandable to 64 GB or even 128 GB, if needed. As for storage, 1 TB SSD is the default option, but the iMac Pro can be equipped with 2 TB or 4 TB SSDs as well. All the drives use the NVMe protocol, a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and up to 3 GB/s peak sequential read speed. While it looks like Apple is going to use standard memory modules, the iMac Pro does not seem to be user-upgradeable, unlike regular iMacs.

For graphics, Apple picked up AMD’s latest Radeon Pro Vega 56 with 8 GB of HBM2 for prêt-à-porter SKUs and the Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16 GB of HBM2 for build-to-order configurations and, perhaps, for machines that feature an 18-core CPU and 128 GB of RAM. Both Radeon Pro graphics adapters will not come as cards, but will be soldered to iMac Pro’s motherboard, based on one picture supplied by Apple. The company does not disclose frequencies of the bespoke Radeon Pro Vega GPUs it uses, but says that their maximum FP32 compute performance is 11 TFLOPS (which points to around 1340 MHz clock-rate for the Vega 64) and their peak memory bandwidth is 400 GB/s (indicating about 1600 MT/s memory speed), which is slower when compared to the Radeon RX Vega cards for desktops. The main reasons why Apple downlocks its GPUs are of course power consumption and heat dissipation. The company says that Mac Pro’s cooling system can cope with up to 500 W of heat, so it cannot use a 140 W CPU and a 295 W GPU in order to avoid overheating.

Moving on to connectivity. The iMac Pro will feature an 802.11ac Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.2 module (there is no word on the 802.11ac wave2 support, so it could be the same Broadcom controller used inside the latest MacBook Pro laptops), a 10 GbE connector (no word on the controller or its developer), four USB 3.0 Type-A headers, one SDXC card slot, a 3.5-mm audio jack and four Thunderbolt 3 ports to connect additional displays, RAID storage and other peripherals that demand high bandwidth. The Mac Pro also has integrated 1080p webcam, stereo speakers, an array of microphones and so on. Some rumours say that the iMac Pro will feature voice-activated “Siri” assistant and for this reason integrate a recent A-series SoC, but Apple yet has to confirm this.

Apple iMac Pro Brief Specifications
  iMac Pro 27"
Display 27" with 5120 × 2880 resolution
500 cd/m² brightness
DCI-P3 support
10-bit spatial and temporal dithering
CPU Intel Xeon W
8C/16T
3.2/4.2 GHz
8 MB L2
11 MB L3
Intel Xeon
W-2150B

10C/20T
3.0/4.5 GHz
10 MB L2
13.75 MB L3
Intel Xeon
W-2175?

14C/28T
2.5/4.3 GHz
14 MB L2
19.25 MB L3
Intel Xeon W
18C/36T
2.3/4.3 GHz
18 MB L2
24.75 MB L3
PCH C422
Graphics AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 with 8 GB HBM2
or Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16 GB HBM2
Memory 32 GB DDR4-2666 with ECC
Configurable to 64 GB or 128 GB DDR4-2666 with ECC
Storage 1 TB SSD (NVMe, PCIe 3.0 x4)
Configurable to 2 TB SSD or 4 TB SSD
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi + BT 4.2
Ethernet 10 GbE
Display Outputs 4 × Thunderbolt 3
Audio Stereo speakers
Integrated microphones
1 × audio out
USB 4 × USB 3.0 Type-A (5 Gbps)
4 × USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C (via TB3)
Other I/O FHD webcam
SDXC card reader
Dimensions Width 65 cm | 25.6"
Height 51.6 cm | 20.3"
Depth 20.3 cm | 8"
PSU ~ 500 W (to be confirmed)
OS Apple MacOS High Sierra

The iMac Pro will ship with space grey wireless Magic Keyboard with a numeric keypad as well a choice between the Magic Mouse 2 or Magic Trackpad 2. We do not know the official price just yet or details about support and warranty, but there are unofficial indications that the cheapest iMac Pro will sell for $4999.

Related Reading:

Sources: Apple, MacRumours, Marques Brownlee

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  • davide445 - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    I didn't understand exactly why anyone else than someone using only Apple sw will need this thing.
    Here a confirmation with double the power, high quality components and same price
    https://pcpartpicker.com/user/davide445/saved/fPTN...
  • stevielee - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    davide445:
    Great alternative iMac Pro setup you chose there. But your particular configuration is way more powerful (CPU & GPU) than the entry level 5K+ iMac Pro. Your setup would probably match (sans RAM total & SSD size), the top of the product line 10K+ iMac Pro. And with both the iMac Pro's CPU & GPU being either custom LP parts, as in: B versions of the W-Xeon's, along with underclocking the custom AMD GPU to satisfy Apple's 500w power envelope - even the best iMac Pro that you can buy at up to 15K+ (with tax and a obligatory Applecare warranty), your Nvidia Titan still will easily outperform the iMac's downclocked Vega 64 by a relatively large margin.
    And the best thing about your pcpartpicker rig is that almost all of the parts you selected can be easily upgraded as your need and/or financial means change in the next couple of years. The iMac Pro is basically: what you purchase, you are forever stuck with - regardless of how much money you might have paid, or what your future equipment requirements may be.

    Apple has done it again: cramming and throttling and soldering all of the internals to fit into a sealed (non-user upgradable) package that they will probably have to do another mea culpa all over again in 3 years time to try and explain to everyone who bought the now obsolete AIO's that they just didn't forsee the hardware issues that arose from insisting that everything in Apple's ecosystem conform to their extreme anorexic design regiment.
  • ddrіver - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    What's the point of your exercise? Buying parts and assembling a system will always be cheaper than buying an OEM one. Your calculation is junk anyway, I can buy it from Ebay for less than $4K ;).

    Do you think a company or anybody buying 5 or 10 or more of these iMacs would ever bother assembling a system by hand? Turn on your brains before you post. This BS idea that you can build it yourself and it's cheaper than the preconfigured system needs to die already. Laptops or servers fall into the same category. Maybe you're going to start wondering why companies buy HP or Dell or Cisco servers instead of assembling them with parts from Newegg,
  • ddrіver - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    And BTW, if you look at offers from HP or other OEMs you'll see the same kind of prices: they start at ~$2500 for 4 core Xeons, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. And that doesn't include the 5K display and the clean design.

    Whiners gonna whine.
  • stevielee - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    And trollers gotta troll.

    YOU are not the last word in everything tech, or what "most" other do, or want, or buy: Apple, or otherwise.

    And I an unanimous in that!
  • Focher - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link

    Sorry, but nope. You already show your hand by comparing a Xeon with an AMD CPU. I guess you just look at the number of cores and GHz to compare. That doesn't cut it. And memory bandwidth is much lower. And SSD bandwidth is lower.

    If you don't understand what the iMac Pro was designed for, and what it can do, you'll just continue to post such ridiculous comparisons.

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