Apple introduces a more powerful Xserve and a Mac Pro that comes packed with twice the performance of the previous version of the workstation. These new products come just before the Macworld conference opens in San Francisco.

The two new products comes standard with two new Xeon quad-core chips, codenamed Harpertown. Harpertown was released by Intel only last month.

Excerpt from InformationWeek:

“One of the advantages in using Harpertown is that it packs a lot more performance per watt in the same thermal envelope,” Tom Boger, senior director of desktop, servers and storage product marketing at Apple, told InformationWeek. “Just by itself, the Harpertown processor raw is a 60% improvement over the previous configuration [Cloverton].”

The new Xserve runs the Mac OS X Leopard Server operating system and is positioned as a strong contender aimed at organizations without large IT staffs. Mail hosting, Web hosting, file sharing, client management, network management and security, VPN, chat, search, and directory services software are all included in the OS X Leopard Server.
Pricing for the new desktop machine starts at $2,799, while the new Xserve costs $2,999.