Now there’s few possibilities that Apple may upgrade it’s Mac Pro, Intel unveiled the new Sandy-Bridge based Xeon line of professional CPU, and no new Mac Pro was announced or showed. Why new Mac Pro were difficult to create You could think that putting a new Xeon and Intel chipset will be enough to create new Mac Pro, but that’s all but true, and the worse thing is that it was Apple choice: Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt mix audio+video output and PCI-Express 4x tunneling. If you want to have a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac Pro (as all other Mac!), you need to be able to send audio, video and PCI-Express bus to a Thunderbolt connector. On a Mac Pro, you expect to have 3 Thunderbolt output at least. The problem is that PCI-Express graphic card use all 16-lane available, and there’s no way to send them the 12 lane necessary to have 3 Thunderbolt port on the card. If you just decide to keep only 4 lane for the graphic card, you will seriously limit it’s performance-level, and anyway you will need a totally new design for few graphic card sold. And anyway there’s no Intel chipset that support to split PCI-Exress x16 into