Watch the New Mac Pro...Go, Go, Go!

Apple has, just a week before Macworld Expo, announced the immediate availability (as soon as the Store is back up, we presume) of a new Mac Pro tower that proudly boasts of having two of Intel’s spanking new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors, a choice of high-end graphics cards from both ATI (the Radeon HD 2600 XT, 256MB) and NVIDIA (Quadro FX 5600) and a storage capacity of up to four terabytes. It looks exactly the same as it did a few hours ago though. The standard configuration is priced at $2,799.

Apple's Phil Schiller is calling these machines the "fastest Mac we've ever made"

When using the right applications, users of the new Mac Pro could find upwards of twice the performance of the last generation, thanks to the quad-core CPUs, which in some cases can do many times the work of a traditional CPU or even multi-core CPUs. Graphics and 3-D rendering applications in particular should see a serious improvement with this new beast.

The new Pro is available today starting at $2,799. But you should know this: If you configure it to the max and with the fastest chips and the most memory, you'll be looking at a figure closer just shy of $20,000. Yes, that's the right number of zeros.