Dual 1.25 GHz PowerMacs Are Shipping (In Time To Apply To September Quarter)

A pple has announced that its high-end Dual 1.25 GHz PowerMacs are shipping. The company announced the new towers at MACWORLD New York in July. The units push some 18 gigaflops, and the companyis press release is touting faster performance than Pentium 4 equipped PCs in several categories. From Apple:

Apple® today announced it has begun shipping the Power Mac® G4 with dual 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, the fastest Macintosh® ever for creative professionals. The dual 1.25 GHz system has a new Xserve(TM) high-performance architecture with support for up to 2GB of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory at up to 333 MHz, the industryis first ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card and an enhanced enclosure with increased storage up to nearly half a terabyte.

"The Power Mac G4 with dual processors running at 1.25 GHz is the fastest Mac ever made," said Philip Schiller, Appleis senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The combination of the Xserve architecture and Mac OS X version 10.2 iJaguari provides an incredibly powerful and stable platform for our professional customers."

The new all dual-processor Power Mac G4 line also ships with Appleis new Mac® OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" pre-installed, offering more than 150 amazing new features and applications. Taking advantage of "Jaguaris" advanced UNIX-based architecture and symmetric multiprocessing capabilities, the Power Mac G4 delivers over 18 gigaflops (18 billion floating point operations per second). In application testing*, the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 performs image editing tasks up to 90 percent faster, MPEG-2 video encoding up to 43 percent faster, and scientific analysis up to 440 percent faster than a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4-based PC.

* Performance tests were based on commonly used operations in Adobe Photoshop 7.0, MPEG-2 encoding using iDVD 2 software and Sonic DVDit Professional Edition and the Ligos encoder, and A/G BLAST and NCBI BLAST software.

You can get more information on the PowerMac line at Appleis Web site, and the Apple Store. The Dual 1.25 GHz model is priced at US$3299.