Apple will reportedly upgrade the iMac and Mac Pro lines in the last quarter of 2017 and the planned specs bumps will include a more powerful Intel Xeon chip, RAM provision of up to 64GB and optional hardware and accessories jump like an AMD GPU and 8K monitor.
When the iMac 2017 and new Mac Pro models start rolling out, the machines will likely be powered by the Intel Xeon E3-1280 v6 processor, which MacRumors said will have an integrated Intel HD Graphics P630. The report pointed to a recent Pike's Universum blog post as source of its information.
The same story did not touch on how exactly the new Intel Xeon CPU will make the next-gen iMacs and Mac Pros more powerful and efficient but it's likewise understood that the processing will be supported by ECC RAM in three configurations - 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. It remains unclear if the memory will be DDR4 or DDR3L but the use of EEC RAM will provide better protection against system crashes and data corruption.
The same blog also claimed that the professional-geared MacOS machines will come out of the box with faster NVM Express PCIe-based flash storage and the supported capacity will be up to 2TB.
And as Thunderbolt 3 ports already debuted with the MacBook Pro 2016, the same technology is expected to be part of the package. This will clear the way for the computers to natively support 8K monitors that will render videos and images in 33 million pixels.
However, 8K monitor on the iMac 2017 and new Mac Pros will likely be an optional or exclusive offering. "Apple will likely price it out of reach of anyone who doesn't do the most demanding creative things for a living, like CAD, virtual reality content development, film production and more," iDownloadBlog.com said in a related report.
Another optional component is AMD GPU as the products will have Intel graphics card as default engines. It's possible that iMac and Mac Pro buyers will be given the option to upgrade to AMD cards for professional use and artificial intelligence-related purposes.
The blog predicted that release date of the new Mac Pros and iMac 2017 will happen around October this year or two years after the last hardware upgrade release.