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?
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