Apple has announced its new Mac Pro will be available to order in the UK from Thursday 19 December, starting from £2,499.

In a radical departure from the previous cases, which employed the standard rectangular design, the new Mac Pro is shaped like a cylinder and takes up about one eighth the volume of previous models.

Designed around a ‘thermal core’ that pulls air from the bottom to the top of the machine, the new Mac Pro features 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at speeds of up to 3.9 GHz, and two workstation-class AMD FirePro graphics processors that deliver up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro.

PCIe-based flash storage delivers sequential read speeds up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives, according to Apple, and the new Mac Pro has up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth for simultaneously editing full-resolution 4K video and rendering effects in the background.

The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor and dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of RAM, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of storage starting at £2,499. Another version with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of RAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage starts at £3,299.

Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of RAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage.