Apple previewed the new Mac Pro back in June and the high-end system is now finally official, set to go on sale in December.

The company announced the availability of the new Mac Pro on Tuesday, Oct. 22, during an event it held in San Francisco.

"The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been reimagined and there has never been anything like it," touted Philip Schiller, Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing. "The new Mac Pro packs up to 12-core Xeon CPUs, dual FirePro GPUs, ultra-fast ECC memory, new PCle flash storage, Thunderbolt 2 expandability and more into a radical new design that is one-eighth the size of the previous generation Mac Pro."

The cheaper Mac Pro configuration starts at $2,999 and packs an Intel Xeon E5 processor clocked at 3.7GHz, 10MB of L3 cache, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, and 12GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM installed as three 4GB modules with one RAM slot open. This model also includes 256GB of PCle-based flash storage, as well as two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each.

For $1,000 more, the $3,999 Mac Pro comes with a six-core Xeon E5 processor clocked at 3.5GHz, 12MB of L3 cache, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, and 16GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM installed as four 4GB modules, with no RAM slot left open. This model also has 256GB of PCle-based flash storage and two AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each.

Apple is also offering some customization options for the new Mac Pro, but the company has yet to make its online "configurator" available so interested customers could see the prices for various upgrades.

"Designed around an innovative unified thermal core, the Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores, dual workstation-class GPUs, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, PCle-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory," further notes the press release.

The new Mac Pro will go on sale in December, but Apple has not mentioned a specific launch date so far. Stay tuned for more details as they become available.