At the end of last week, Apple quietly announced a speed bump for the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro being the most powerful, most expensive and also the only tower-styled Mac has been in need of a speed booster. In addition to speed, new storage options are now available for both the Mac Pro and the Xserve.

For the quad-core Mac Pro (but not the eight-core model), you can now order a 3.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. This is an amazing CPU, with 8 MB of fully shared L3 cache, Hyper-Threading technology, an integrated memory controller, and Turbo Boost for short bursts of speed up to 3.6 GHz. Now that prices have come down a bit on 2 TB hard drives, Apple has made them a configure-to-order option for Mac Pro and Xserve systems. Using high-performance 7200 RPM SATA drives with 32 MB of cache and a potential throughput of 3 Gb/s, the Mac Pro can now have a total storage capacity of 8 TB, while the Xserve can max out at 6 TB of storage. The prices for those of you in the US can be seen in the screenie above, if you’re in the UK, click here to be brought to the UK site.