There is no botch job and the M3 isn’t stagnant as to chip set ability. You are making judgments without any proof.
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Did Apple rush an 'inferior' SOC to market ?
- Thread starter ProgRocker
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How about providing data that support your claims?
I welcome any data that shows the M3 Pro shows CPU performance improvements over the M2 Pro.
So far we know:
-Apple claims no performance gain
-Fewer performance cores
-~10% reduction in transistor count
Your turn.
Using what little information we currently know, I believe the new chip is an improvement albeit not as much as some here expected tech spec wise.
M3 Max results? M3 base results? What's the relevance when I was discussing the M3 Pro chip specifically?
I hope it's at least a fractional improvement. 1% gain would be better than nothing or regression.
I’m sure they will claim victory over a few enhancements (whole 4GB more maximum memory, AV1 hardware decoding, hardware based ray tracing, etc). In reality, I believe the role of M3+ pro chips will be entering a new phase. They will provide enhancements to the number (and potentially, in the future, types) of ports and number of external displays as compared to baseline M chips.
Basically , The future role of the M3 pro chip (and M4 pro, M5 pro, etc) will primarily provided improved I/O from the baseline. For processing enhancements the push will be to upgrade to Max/Ultra chips
All of those improvements, but also much stronger graphics.
It is a bit annoying how with Apple you must buy an extreme high end multi core processor just to get powerful graphics, or vice versa. Lots of people only need one or the other. It is limiting and expensive when the graphics aren't discrete.
Also one more point. One of the key reasons to move away from intel was that intel wasn't delivering improvements on a yearly basis anymore. Apple was constantly waiting on intel to deliver the goods before refreshing their computer designs which severely limited their business. It should not come to a surprise that Apple will always try to push a refresh every year and again, it's not as if M3 is the same chip as M2 like a lot of intel's recent offerings. Apple is still launching faster stuff every year and that is their goal.
M3 and M3 max are significant year-year improvements. It is the Pro which looks really marginal and not much better than the level of improvements Intel was delivering. Cutting 10% of the Pros transistor budget was always going to make it look bad.
What I have read about M3B is that it is essentially better then M3E, but harder to implement.
Sure, I’m commenting on the topic which is “did apple rush this to market”, not a specific chip which the presumption is “did apple cut down m3 pro to make m3 max more competitive”
i’ll wait for the benchmarks of m3 pro, i’m guessing it’ll still be faster just not 20% faster with perhaps much better battery life.
Not even that, the thin design of the 2016-2019 machines was clearly designed for a thermal envelope that Intel promised was on their roadmap, but continually kept missing or disregarding entirely delivering on like they did for a solid decade.
People note that those machines are hot and noisy, and they are, but it would t be nearly as bad if Intel had actually delivered on their public roadmaps instead of constant delays and just running chips hotter and with more power each “refresh”.
Short answer: NO.
M3 family is champion of performance/watt, it also now have raytracing and other plus.
M3 family is champion of performance/watt, it also now have raytracing and other plus.
Better single core, about the same multi core. We don’t have much insight into GPU but any GPU compute that is memory bound will likely be slower.
Look we get it, you don’t care that Apple repositioned the pro lower down the performance stack relative to its generational peers, that’s nice. For some of us that is a disappointment.
These chips are planned out years in advance. Delays happen, unexpected things definitely happen, but there’s only so much “rushing” that can happen with something that takes years of development and planning
No sensible M2 MacBook Pro user should even be considering a M3 MacBook Pro. Their devices are 6-9 months old max. This update is not for them.
Agreed. There's a reason Apple focused on the performance improvements over the M1 series rather than M2 in last week's event. The only reason I even looked at the M3 Max models was because I've always wanted the Pro to come in a darker color than Space Gray, but there's not enough of a performance boost or additional features with M3 that I don't have now. Besides, this machine already handles everything I've thrown at it without so much as a wimper (or fan noise).
I really don’t understand what you are trying to argue for. Yes, multi-core performance of M3 Pro is not going to be significantly higher than that if M2 Pro. Same for the GPU. These are thinks we’ve known since the launch. So what?
It’s obvious that Apple is rebalancing the M- family, pushing the Max more towards extreme performance spectrum while keeping the Pro at mid-range performance. Nothing about this is a “botched job”, it’s all very carefully planned.
Using the same form factor is all about making the unnecessary MacBook Pro 13" into MacBook Pro 14" base model. Remember it was the case with Intel MacBook Pro as well. There was a MacBook Pro 13" model with 2 TB port instead of 4 and with 15 watt Intel CPU instead of 28 watt one. In fact, that model should have been phased out since M1 and it should have always come with as 14". Therefore, M3 and M3 Pro being on the same form factor is not a hint of one being the binned version of the other. Also looking at the die graphics, it is easy to tell that they are two completely different chips with different layouts.