Apple has begun shipping 18-core iMac Pro models to customers in the United States.
Several iMac Pro customers have noted in MacRumors’ discussion forums that they’re now seeing the status of their order changed to “Preparing Shipment” or, in some cases, “Shipped.”
This isn’t surprising as resellers recently started selling the commercial version of Intel’s 18-core chip, meaning at least some of these processors are starting to roll off the line.
First orders are estimated for delivery starting Tuesday, February 6. The 18-core iMac Pro start at $7,399. 8-core and 10-core configurations started shipping in late December 2017.
“Apple quoted a shipping estimate of 6-8 weeks for 18-core iMac Pros, pushing most deliveries into early February, so it is ever so slightly ahead of its schedule,” MacRumors notes.
They haven’t confirmed if 14-core models have shipped yet.
When you purchase an iMac Pro from Apple’s website, your email receipt should show “Order In Progress” followed by a delivery date. Build-to-order configurations like a maxed out 18-core iMac Pro may show the order status ““Processing” or “Sent to Manufacturing.”
Apple charges your credit card when your order starts shipping although your credit card payment is authorized at the time of the purchase. The Cupertino company began taking orders for the new iMac Pro about six weeks ago.
A fully maxed out iMac Pro model with an 18-core Intel Xeon chip, 4TB of SSD storage, 128GB of ECC RAM and AMD’s Radeon Pro Vega 64 graphics with 16GB of HBM2 memory increases the retail price to an eye-watering $13,199.
The baseline iMac Pro configuration saw some strong GeekBench scores and I can only imagine how speedy an 18-core model is when processing 4K video and running other resource-intensive operations. Keep in mind that the Xeon chip’s strength is its powerful multi-core performance.
In terms of single-core performance, iMac Pro isn’t dramatically faster than its predecessor.
If you plan on buying this machine, be sure that your favorite apps take full advantage of multi-core processing. Apps that haven’t been specifically optimized to run on multiple cores won’t see much of a speed difference on the new iMac Pro.