CUPERTINO, Calif., Sept. 18 -- Apple today announced it has begun shipping the Power Mac G4 with dual 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, the fastest Macintosh ever for creative professionals. The dual 1.25 GHz system has a new Xserve high-performance architecture with support for up to 2GB of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory at up to 333 MHz, the industry's first ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card and an enhanced enclosure with increased storage up to nearly half a terabyte. "The Power Mac G4 with dual processors running at 1.25 GHz is the fastest Mac ever made," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The combination of the Xserve architecture and Mac OS X version 10.2 'Jaguar' provides an incredibly powerful and stable platform for our professional customers." The new all dual-processor Power Mac G4 line also ships with Apple's new Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" pre-installed, offering more than 150 amazing new features and applications. Taking advantage of "Jaguar's" advanced UNIX-based architecture and symmetric multiprocessing capabilities, the Power Mac G4 delivers over 18 gigaflops (18 billion floating point operations per second). In application testing*, the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 performs image editing tasks up to 90 percent faster, MPEG-2 video encoding up to 43 percent faster, and scientific analysis up to 440 percent faster than a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4-based PC. The dual 1.25-GHz processor Power Mac G4 is available now through the online Apple Store (www.apple.com), at Apple Retail Stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $3,299 (US) and includes: * 2MB of DDR SRAM L3 cache per processor with up to 4.6GBps throughput; * 512MB of DDR SDRAM memory at up to 333 MHz; * a ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card with 64MB DDR SDRAM in 4x AGP slot; * a 120GB Ultra ATA/100 7200 rpm hard disk drive; and * a SuperDrive DVD-R/CD-RW optical drive. * Performance tests were based on commonly used operations in Adobe Photoshop 7.0, MPEG-2 encoding using iDVD 2 software and Sonic DVDit Professional Edition and the Ligos encoder, and A/G BLAST and NCBI BLAST software. Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.