A week before MacWorld, where rumors have it unveiling an anorexically thin Flash-based notebook, Apple upgraded its Mac Pro workstation with Intel's brand new 3.2GHz 45nm quad-core Harpertown Xeon chips to create its fastest Mac ever.

Eight cores are now standard on the box, which comes with new ATI graphics, a PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that doubles its bandwidth and up to 4TB of internal storage. Apple says it can support eight 30-inch displays at once. It's described as ideal for film and video editors.

Pricing starts at $2,800 and there are build-to-order options like a 2.8GHz uniprocessor.

Meanwhile, the company's Xserve 1U has gone the same upgrade route using two 3GHz Harpertown CPUs that are supposed to make it twice as fast as its predecessor. It comes with unlimited Leopard client licenses at a starting price of $3,000. The Xserve also uses two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots and accelerated graphics.