Apple’s scary event saw the arrival of the company’s new chips for personal computers: M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max. They will be available in the new 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro laptops, and the entry-level variant is also in the 24″ iMac.
The biggest improvement is the GPU, aimed at improving the performance of professional apps and games. It will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, a first for Apple silicon. Another first is the 3nm process, as Cupertino is the first to implement this technology in personal computer chips.
The base M3 has an eight-core CPU with a cluster of four for performance and the other four for efficiency. The GPU is 10-core with a next-generation architecture and is said to be 65% faster than the M1 when it comes to graphics. Unified storage support goes up to 24GB.
The M3 Pro features a 12-core CPU (six for performance, six for efficiency) and an 18-core GPU that’s 40 percent faster than the M1 Pro. It supports up to 36GB of storage unified storage.
Apple’s real highlight in the lineup is the M3 Max: a 16-core CPU (12 for performance, 4 for efficiency), a 40-core GPU, and support for up to 128GB of unified storage. The chip is 50% faster than the M1 Max, while the graphics alone perform 80% better, which is huge, considering the M2 Max was 30% faster than its predecessor the Last year.
Ray-tracing support means the M3 chips can finally compete with Nvidia and Arm GPUs, seen in consoles, PC gaming stations and Windows laptops. Hardware-accelerated mesh shading allows developers to enhance complex scenes in GPU-intensive games and apps.
There’s also Dynamic Caching on the M3 silicon, which allocates exactly as much memory as the GPU needs. Apple has said that this is an industry first and that developers will appreciate it, since they won’t have to build around it – it’s transparent and automatic progress.
We have yet to see how these improvements will translate into real life. Apple said the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max have an improved neural engine to accelerate machine learning models, but it didn’t say how much they actually improved.
Power efficiency is notable with the M3 chips, as the family now uses the 3nm process, just like the A17 Pro platform in the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. During the event, Apple compared CPU performance and the M3’s GPU with those of an Intel Core i7 1360P laptop equipped with a base Iris Xe graphics chip, claiming it delivers the same performance at 25 percent power.
Apple M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max
The M3 chip will be available in the iMac. Along with the M3 Pro, it can also be found in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and both chips will be available in their respective devices starting November 7. The M3 Max will begin shipping with the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro notebooks later in November.
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