Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?
From Apple’s slides starting at 10:29:
M3 = 35% faster CPU than M1; 20% faster than M2
M3 Pro = 20% faster CPU than M1 Pro; No comparison to M2 Pro was given! 🤔
M3 Max = 80% faster than M1 Max; 50% faster than M2 Max
When Apple announced the M2 Pro they claimed it was 20% faster than M1 Pro. So are we to assume M3 Pro has no performance improvement this gen?
They’ve reduced the number of performance cores from eight to six, and as per the OP memory bandwidth at 150GB/sec is lower than the 200GB/sec of the M1 Pro.
It seems reducing the number of performance cores in favour of efficiency cores has eliminated any overall performance uplift M3 Pro had over M2 Pro. We’ll have to wait for benchmarks to be certain, but I’m sure Apple’s omission of a comparison to M2 Pro is very telling.
These things already had incredible battery life, I’m not sure why Apple would choose to sacrifice performance for more battery life? The people buying these machines, myself included, are pros that need performance, and the rest of the M3 family has CPU performance improvements, so why not M3 Pro?
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Gpu cores m3 for machine learning
As an owner of two m1 pro 14”ers, I’ve never felt more vindicated in my life.
Poor Mac mini gets shafted. Woulda liked to see 8 performance cores somewhere, considering the M3 Max moved up to 10 performance cores for the base
Can we expect benchmarks to pop up before the official release?
Single core performance will still be higher. Multi core performance might even be tiny bit smaller vs M2 pro. M3 pro will be significantly more efficient vs M2 pro as well.
I think it’s because they plan to put the M3 Pro chip inside an iPad Pro or maybe even the Apple TV - if they market it for gaming. Or maybe just trying to shrink the Mac mini but still keep the pro chip inside.
Either way, I think they’re trying to lower the TDP of the chip so they can fit it into smaller devices.
It better to say the put effort into bespoke designing it rather than just taking part of the Max chips design… why did they put this effort in? I expect the reason is yields are lower on 3nm and cost per mm2 is much higher… You can see from the die shots how everything is packed much tighter on the M3 Pro compared to the M2 pro (this takes a lot of work to do and still have the internal frabic within the chip). Apple clearly wanted to shink the die size down otherwise they would have had to increase the prices of Macs with the M3 Pro.
Does anyone know if the M3 generation is on N3B or N3E?
I think the M1 Pro was too compelling of an option so they nerfed it to get more differentiation and force more folks to max. It may not work this generation because folks see what’s going on but eventually it will lead to higher margins.
The base M1 chip is still super compelling. I think Apple painted themselves into a corner with the M1 MacBook Air. I have one since 2020 and I’d buy another if it died. If you aren’t doing heavy workloads the M1 is fine even fanless. And I’ve toyed with some 4k video in iMovie so it’s not like I’m babying the thing.
Only place I feel like I’d really benefit from a better chip would be 3d modeling/rendering, heavy video / photo editing, etc
I think Apple has already hit general adoption for speed but I think they are working on 2 key aspects that were not ready for the M1/2.
- PCI lanes M1/2/3 all seem limited in this respect
- CPU/GPU extensions (ray tracing, etc… that you’re seeing on M3)
- Memory management
I think the M3 is their next iteration to tackle the above which is why it was at a throw away conference the day before Halloween. It’s not meant to be a generational shift, its iterative.
People like long battery life (a staple of Apple Macs) so its an easy sales feature while they focus on some more core functionality in future chips. Nothing wrong with the approach, also why I assume this is non-pro ATM, the IO/PCI lanes.
Just my speculation tho.
I mean it’s also cheaper than the M2 Pro spec for spec where I live (to the tune of £100 or £200 based on MSRP, though the M2 series models are now cheaper due to sales) so I think it’s probably an attempt to upsell M-series Base users to the M-series Pro.
This is probably also why the M3 Base made it to the 14 inch, minus the black colour and a criminal 8GB of base RAM and 256GB SSD (even if realistically it’s probably fine for a fair few people, I’d expect Apple to eat the minimal actual cost on a machine that’s £1700) to make comparisons favouring spending the extra for the M3 Pro easier.
M3 has 512GB SSD on the 14" MBP. Only the iMac has 255GB SSD.
Yeah…but still no 27 inch iMac.
I’d be going from the M1 Pro with a 10 core (8P + 2E) setup to any of the M3 Pros…
is the 11 core a (6P + 5E) combo? Either way, seems like a downgrade, so no reason to upgrade for another 2-3 years
Apple claims M3 p-cores are 15% faster, and e-cores are 30% faster.
For M2, e-cores were 40% of p-cores
Base M3 Pro -> (5×1.15+6×0.4×1.3)/(6+4×0.4) is 17% faster than M2 Pro
Upgraded M2 Pro -> (6×1.15+6×0.4×1.3)/(8+4×0.4) is 4% faster than M2 Pro
Base is still decent bump. Otherwise, just jump straight to M3 Max.
Upgraded M2 Pro -> (6×1.15+6×0.4×1.3)/(8+4×0.4) is 4% faster than M2 Pro
Upgraded M2 Pro? You mean the 12 core CPU version?
Sorry, I meant to compare upgraded M3 Pro to upgraded M2 Pro.
Will edit my comment to reflect that.
Seems like a good direction.
These things already had incredible performance, I’m not sure why Apple would choose to sacrifice battery life for more performance? The people buying these machines, myself included, are pros that need battery life.
What I’m actually disappointed with, is that M3 is still limited to 24GB RAM, just like M2.
Yes, that’s much better than just 16GB in M1, but, come on, what is this, enough for like 10 browser tabs in Chrome?
They’re basically forcing me to get M2 Pro if I need more than 24GB; well, at least I don’t have to sacrifice the battery life as much as with M3 Max, but it’s still extra CPU I don’t need.