I remember debating, about a decade ago, the sensitive issue of "x86 versus PowerPC performance" with my fellow nerds while dealing with dandruff.

So look at where we are now. I still have dandruff, but the Apple Mac Pro is getting a whopper of a processor that promises to send professional desktop consumers to high heaven on fluffy clouds of cheddar (for the Apple noobs, the "cheddar" joke refers to the "cheesegrater-like appearance" of the Mac Pro casing - look at the picture above).

The Mac Pros are getting 64-bit dual-core Xeon Woodcrest processors. With 4MB L2 cache (for the non-technical, that just means the processor has a lot of built-in space to do extra things). Top speed? 3GHz. For those Appletons not familiar with the Xeon, the Xeon series of microprocessors are Intel's server-class PC microprocessors. They are usually used for multiple-processor PCs. And now, for multiprocessor Macs, because Apple is putting two (that's 2) of those Xeon beauties in each Mac Pro.

This new Mac Pro definitely promises to be better than the G5. While this is more or less what was previously anticipated, the details about the cheesy insides are just yummy: it has room for four (that's 4) internal HDDs, although the basic Mac Pro will "only" have a 250GB HDD. And 1GB RAM. And the NVIDIA GeForce 256MB 7300GT. And a 16x SuperDrive. That sounds about right for a powerful office server.

Not good enough you say? Can't grate the cheese you say? Well, you can opt for up to 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of disk space (for noobs who don't know what a "TB" is, let me just say that one "TB" or terabyte is roughly one trillion bytes, one million megabytes, or one thousand GB). Now that's some serious cheese.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm now waiting for the Mac Pro to get the quad-core processor so I can calculate the meaning of life. And yes, I'm still dealing with dandruff.