Apple, who has a tiny market share among computer makers, but is praised by design and music communities, is shipping its Mac Pro systems that contain yet unannounced quad-core microprocessors by Intel Corp. Earlier only Dell, the world’s largest maker of personal computers (PC) could obtain unannounced or “rare” processors for Intel.

Apple’s new Mac Pro machines, which are aimed at professionals, can now be equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon processors 5300-series clocked at 3.0GHz and utilizing 1333MHz processor system bus, which have not been officially unveiled yet. The move may either indicate that such chip will be formally unwrapped in several days or weeks, or that Apple and Intel have some kind of “special” relations under which the latter provides the former products not expected to be released shortly.

Being targeted at the workstation market, the new fully-fledged Mac Pro can support up to 16GB of PC2-5300 memory; up to four hard disk drives (which currently gives 3TB of storage space); up to four GeForce 7300 GT, Radeon X1900 XT 512MB or Quadro FX 4500 512MB graphics cards, up to two optical drives and so on. The new Mac Pro system configured to the maximum will cost its owner about $5000.

Intel and Apple did not comment on the news-story.