Mac Pro Late 2013

There is no mistaking the "Late 2013" Mac Pro models for earlier ones as they present an Apple described "radical" departure from the large, highly expandable tower case design of yore and instead feature a compact dark gray, glossy cylinder design that is approximately one eighth of the mass but has limited internal expansion.

Apple explains that these "Space Gray" cylinder Mac Pro models are "designed around an innovative unified thermal core" and have not only faster processors than earlier models but also dual workstation class graphics processors, faster memory, and faster PCIe 2.0 x4 flash storage. Instead of internal expansion, the system provides extensive high speed ports for external connectivity options.

The Mac Pro "Twelve Core" 2.7 (Late 2013) is a "custom-order" configuration of either the Mac Pro "Quad Core" 3.7 (Late 2013), Mac Pro "Six Core" 3.5 (Late 2013), or Mac Pro "Eight Core" 3.0 (Late 2013). However, note that the "Quad Core" model was discontinued and the "Eight Core" model only became a standard configuration possible to custom configure on April 4, 2017. Apart from processor, this model can be identical to the stock models.

The Mac Pro "Twelve Core" 2.7 (Late 2013) features a single 2.7 GHz Twelve Core 22-nm Xeon E5-2697v2 processor with a dedicated 256k of L2 cache for each core and 30MB of level 3 "Smart Cache." If otherwise equipped as the default models, this configuration has 12 GB or 16GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D300, D500, or D700 graphics processors with 2 GB, 3 GB, or 6GB of GDDR5 memory each, respectively.

Connectivity includes six Thunderbolt 2 ports, one HDMI 1.4 UltraHD port, 4 USB 3.0 ports, and Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports along with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0.

Originally, this model reportedly supported as many as three 4K displays or six Thunderbolt displays. However, on June 16, 2015, without updating the graphics cards themselves, Apple quietly increased the official support to as many as three 5K displays (5120x2880) -- two using Thunderbolt 2 ports and one using the HDMI port. The support for as many as six 2560x1600 displays using all six Thunderbolt 2 ports remained unchanged.

Reigning as the pinnacle of the cylindrical Mac Pro line, this 12-core model packed astonishing power within its compact chassis. [3, 9, 36] The Xeon E5-2697v2 processor, paired with the optional dual FirePro D700 GPUs, possessed the performance to smoothly handle even the most demanding tasks of its time, such as real-time 4K video editing and complex 3D rendering. [22, 24, 29] Its innovative unified thermal core was highly praised for maintaining a quiet and comfortable working environment even under heavy loads. [29] However, its beautiful design was achieved at the cost of internal expandability, and the absence of the PCIe slots that many pro users desired became a major point of contention. [45] The design philosophy, which relied entirely on external expansion via Thunderbolt 2 ports, was accepted by some but drew sharp criticism from those accustomed to traditional tower models. [3, 9]