Hardware hacker extraordinaire Anand Lal Shimpi from AnandTech is so influential that Intel sends him engineering samples of their upcoming processors. Anand recently acquired an engineering sample of a quad-core Intel core 2 Xeon CPU, code-name “Cloverton”. The quad-core Cloverton is pin-compatible with the LGA-771 CPU sockets shipping in the current Mac Pro hardware. Like any good hardware hacker would, Anand decided to toss two Cloverton CPU’s into one of the current Mac Pros and see what happened. Amazingly the CPU’s worked flawlessly and the OS X CPU showed 8 processors cores happily humming away under the Mac Pro’s hood. Unfortunately Anand was unable to disclose the performance of this configuration as he is legally prohibited from releasing benchmaks of pre-release hardware. I think it’s safe to say that Dual Quad-Core Mac Pro’s are just around the corner and we here at MacResearch hope to be able to put it through rounds of scientific benchmarking when it does. Follow this link to see the full article at AnandTech.