With less than a week before the beginning of Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Apple has jumped the gun a bit and released an updated version of its professional level Mac Pro desktop.

The new Mac Pro, which is powered by two of Intel's new Harpertown-based 45 nanometer quad-core Xeon 5400 processors, features speeds up to 3.2 GHz and storage capacities up to four terabytes. According to Electronista, the unit features 12 megabytes of cache per processor, dual-independent 1,600 MHz front side buses and store up to 32 gigabytes of 800 MHz DDR2 RAM. Apple has cited a 61% increase in memory throughput.

The new Mac Pro units arrive with ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256 megabytes of video RAM onboard as well as an upgraded PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that is said to double the bandwidth of the previous generation of Mac Pro.

High-end graphics users and gamers will be able to support new cards such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, which arrives with 512 megabytes of video RAM as well as the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600, which arrives with 1.5 gigabytes of video RAM onboard as well as a stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

The new units support up to four graphics cards, making the machine capable of driving up to eight 30" displays at once.

Included ports on the system include five USB 2.0 slots, two FireWire 400 slots, two FireWire 800 slots, an optical and analog audio in and out, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a headphone jack.

The Mac Pro begins at US$2,799 and is available immediately.

Cool stuff and feel free to toss your two cents in over in the comments or forums.