If you’re a creative professional who works with either video, audio, graphics or some combination thereof, there’s a good chance that the venerable MacPro tower is your go-to machine. There’s no denying that creative pros make up a large portion of Apple’s audience, yet, all but the highest-end MacPro have languished in neglect since August 2006. And as Apple surely knows, keeping a machine on the market for more than a year–let alone a machine that’s supposed to be a high-end workstation–without an update is unheard of in this industry. So it’s not too surprising that we’ve been hearing rumblings of new MacPros for a while now, including one tantalizing rumor that had Apple snatching up all of Intel’s top-bin Penryns. And now, a bit more info is starting to trickle out: apparently Apple is in a bit of a hurry to get revamped MacPros on the market–who would’ve thunk it? The hold up is apparently Intel’s 45nm Penryn chips, which are due in mid-November. Specs? The new high-end is rumored to rock two quad-core Xeon “Harpertown” chips, each of which could run at speeds as high as 3.2Ghz with a 1600MHz bus and 12MB of L2 cache. Sounds like a blazing-fast machine to me–hopefully Intel can pump out those Penryns quick enough to meet demand for the new towers.

For more on the rumors:
– see this AppleInsider article