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Since last week, rumors had been in the air about Apple's plans to upgrade the iMacs ahead of the educational buying season. With these upgrades, the company is looking to get a bigger share in the educational computing market. Incidentally, the new Penryn processors are already in use in Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The last major update for the iMac in August 2007 brought a new design
Coming to the newest upgraded iMacs, the CPU now has a 45-nm architecture instead of the earlier 65-nm, and 6MB of L2 cache instead of 4MB. Before yesterday's upgrades, the processor speeds were 2 or 2.4 GHz; but now the speeds are 2.4, 2.66, and 2.8 GHz in different models including even a 3.06 GHz as a built-to-order option. All three iMac configurations now come with 1066 MHz front-side bus compared to the earlier 800 MHz bus. In addition, instead of the previous 1GB, 2GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory is now a part of the 2.66 and 2.88 GHz iMacs. Whereas up to 1 TB of storage is optionally available for the 24-inch iMac.
Although the graphics chips remain the same as before -- a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (for entry-level iMacs) and a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 (for the other models) -- customers now have the option of putting a 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800GS chip on the 24-inches iMac. The Nvidia card is claimed to give more than twice the boost to the iMac compared to standard configurations.
The new iMacs are priced at $1,199 (20-inches, 2.4 GHz), $1,499 (20-inches, 2.66 GHz) and $1,799 (24-inches, 2.8 GHz). The built-to-order 24-inches model with 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo chip, Nvidia GeForce 8880 GS graphics card, and 500GB hard drive comes for $2,199.
