Talk about upstaging the competition: As the technology world focused on events at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Apple announced the release of its new Mac Pro, a week ahead of Steve Jobs own Macworld Keynote address scheduled for January 15th in San Francisco.

The new Mac Pro features a standard 8 core configuration, based on a pair of Intel 2.8 GHz quad core Xeon (Harpertown) 5400 Series processors, using the Penryn microarchitecture. Each processor contains 12 MB of L2 cache, and each runs on its own 1600 MHz, 64 bit Front Side Bus.

The standard configuration ships with 2 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 memory and a 320 GB SATA hard drive. The standard video card has been upgraded to an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, graphics card upgrades are available.

The standard Mac Pro still ships with only one optical drive, a 16x Apple SuperDrive. Enhancements have been made to the Mac Pro’s PCI Express expansion capability, it now accepts a full length PCI Express 2.0 card, and two additional full length PCI Express 1.1 cards.

Interestingly, Apple’s technical specifications refer to this Mac Pro as the “Early 2008” model, at least suggesting that another upgrade may be planned for later this year.

We won’t know for sure until the benchmarks are out, but judging from the specs alone, Apple may have just released one of the fastest home computers on the market. The price for the standard model is $2,799.00, it’s now available in many Apple retail stores and at apple.com.