New launches at WWDC - MacPro, intel xserves and Leopard Previe

I've been away for a seriously long time now ! And what made me come back now, you ask ? WWDC, of course !

WWDC is going on right now at San Francisco and will be on till 11th Aug. Steve presented the keynote yesterday alongwith Phil Schiller, Bertrand Serlet, and Scott Forstall, VP of platform experience.

The major announcements were:

1. The brand new Mac Pro will be based on Intel's Xeon chips, also known as Woodcrest. Based on Core2 microarchitecture. Run at speeds up to 3 GHz and include 4 MB shared L2 cache. 127-bit vector engine. Each of those chips sits on a 1/33 GHz Front side bus. 4 channel 256-bit memory bus. Four hard drive pays, up to 2 TB of storage. Our most requested feature, we've got two optical drives. FireWire 800 and another USB on the front. 4 full-length PCI stores. Double-wide graphics slot on the bottom.

2. Apple today announced the new Xserve, a quad Xeon, 64-bit server featuring Mac OS X Server Tiger on two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0GHz, resulting in performance that is over five times that of its predecessor. With an industry-leading high bandwidth server architecture that includes PCI Express, independent 1.33 GHz front side buses with 4MB of shared L2 cache, and fully-buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs), the new Xserve delivers up to four times the I/O bandwidth, up to three times the memory bandwidth and twice the storage bandwidth of the Xserve G5

3. Jobs also previewed the new OSX version, Leopard, today and poked a lot of fun at Vista. There were banners at the place saying things like "Hasta la vista, Vista". Reminds me of the '84 commercial that Apple ran which said "Welcome IBM, seriously !".

The xserve and the MacPro are both out of reach for us commoners ! So I was obviously most interested in the exciting new features that they're putting out in the OS X.5.

1. Virtual desktops support. This is a new feature for OS X which has been there since ages on linux and has been available for OS X in the form of third party apps. Nothing new there, except the name. They call it spaces, wtf !
2. The most interesting feature that I liked is something that Apple calls the Timeline. Its basically a versioning system for files etc, built right into the OS. So, goodbye backups, for now !
3. xcode is also now upto version 3 and apparently has Dtrace built right into it ! This is the most exciting thing is my opinion.

Plus lotsa more updates to mail.app, ichat etc. For the complete marketing blurb go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html

Will come back with more posts as and when I get the time ;)