Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
M3 Chip Generation - Discussion Megathread
- Thread starter scottrichardson
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Sheesh. What's going on buddy? Take a chill pill. You're attacking almost everyone who isn't all in on your speculation. Take a deep breath and go for a walk. No one is trying to say you're wrong or you're an idiot.
I am simply trying to squish misinformation before it spreads. People already start saying that Dynamic Caching is a RAM partitioning scheme or that M3 uses A16 cores. If one doesn’t shush these kind of nonsensical statements immediately it will end up on Wikipedia and then good luck removing it from there. I already tried with M1 GPUs.
The description of the CPU in the Mac keynote matches the iPhone one. The performance improvements are an exact match. Finally, the die shot images of the P fire look identical to A17 Pro. Previous cores had a different physical layout.
We appreciate the insights that you bring. But you've often moved towards the terrorizing side rather than the helpful side. I'm just giving you this feedback from my perspective. You can do what you want with it including nothing at all.
Well, at least let me have some fun while I am at it 😂
At any rate, I’m not trying to be abrasive. It’s just that I have very little time per post and the fine aspects of communication tend to get lost when one is in a rush.
No, not for the Ultra. There's no reason (yet) to think the Ultra will be anything but a 24P + 8E dual-chip, just like the M1 and M2 generations were duals.
As @name99 has documented, Apple's been working on a 4-chip product all along. I have no particular insight on whether or not they think they're ready to ship it, but it's definitely a possibility.
If I had to make a guess now (and I wouldn't be betting money on this), they'll update the Airs and the Studio in January - though I suppose we could see that in November, it seems unlikely. The Pro might ship any time from January to April, with either the Ultra or the Extreme (or whatever they call it, if it even ships).
The reason I think January is most likely is that I think they're trying to get everything in order for yearly updates in October, in the future. If the M3 Airs come out in January, they can do the M4s in October, just like the M2 Pros came out in January of this year and were replaced in October.
Then they'd have everything lined up so they can do all the M5s (except maybe the Mac Pro) in October 2025. Tada, yearly updates. (Just in time for China to invade Taiwan, kill TSMC, and mess with Apple's schedule even worse?)
Or you could be a bit less sensitive.
I'm just giving you this feedback from my perspective. You can do what you want with it including nothing at all.
Here is my perspective on your posts: you want to toss out uninformed, inaccurate nonsense and pretend that it deserves respect? Be prepared for pushback instead, and don't get all bent out of shape when it happens.
Huh? I think you are mistaken leman for somebody else. 😅
Anyway, the information about the A17 pro and M3 CPUs looking to be an exact match is in the Keynote. The info is not on the website about the new M3 SoCs.
At least the base M3 now supports 4K 120Hz over HDMI 😅
No, no, I can be very unpleasant. Part of my charm I suppose.
Lol. I'd like to see some of these people get into an argument with Linus Torvalds. Tears would really flow!
So is the general consensus (absent proper benchmarks) that:
- M3 Max looks to be a good upgrade over M2 Max for both CPU (50% more P Cores than M2 Max) and GPU (40 ray-tracing cores vs 38 non-ray tracing cores), but only if you pony up for the top model
- M3 Pro regresses on the CPU cores and memory bandwidth and is likely to have little to offer over M2 Pro unless you can take advantage of the new GPU features. Query whether in some situations it will be slower than M2 Pro and how edge case these are?
- M3 is an incremental upgrade over M2, keeping the same CPU and GPU cores, so leaning heavily on the better GPU and a small boost to CPU performance
- M3 Max looks to be a good upgrade over M2 Max for both CPU (50% more P Cores than M2 Max) and GPU (40 ray-tracing cores vs 38 non-ray tracing cores), but only if you pony up for the top model
- M3 Pro regresses on the CPU cores and memory bandwidth and is likely to have little to offer over M2 Pro unless you can take advantage of the new GPU features. Query whether in some situations it will be slower than M2 Pro and how edge case these are?
- M3 is an incremental upgrade over M2, keeping the same CPU and GPU cores, so leaning heavily on the better GPU and a small boost to CPU performance
At least with me, you’ve been pretty respectful and polite -so far-, and I tried to let you know about it in some post where we’ve interacted. And I honestly think that’s a better attitude to contribute to a healthy forum environment, where we all learn from each other (some more than others) without ridiculing people who may have less technical knowledge than others. But I am aware that not everyone shares the same personal values. So, I’ll keep doing what I do: engaging in constructive conversation with those who treat me with a minimum of respect -or even just being really neutral like you-, and not engaging with those that, despite providing useful knowledge, use a passive-aggressive tone or just a belligerent tone.
That’s my initial perception as well, yes.
I’m eager to see the first benchmarks!
I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be much love for the M3 Max. The thing looks an absolute monster CPU-wise and I really didn't expect we'd get 12 performance cores. It should comfortably beat a desktop 14900KS (with a TDP of 150w although it's often a lot more) in many tasks and that's just incredible.
The CPU and GPU cores are not the same between the M2 and M3.
To comment on the discussion: I don’t think Apple expects many to upgrade from M2 to M3. They assume upgrade times of 3 or more years, which is clearly reflected in their marketing materials. Hence focus on comparison with Intel Macs.
Yep, they said several times “this upgrade is ideal for people with Intel macs” “11 times faster” during the presentation. As if they were implicitly saying “just throw that burning garbage already and jump into the Apple Silicon gen?” 😆
They also compared the M3 with the M1 and the M2 on some sheets, but they always emphasized the comparison towards the M1 rather the M2.
I wonder if this emphasis on jumping from Intel macs to Apple Silicon macs will be encouraged removing support for Intel macs from macOS in a more steep pace… we’ll see.
From a product perspective, I also thought the push from Intel was interesting. Especially considering the 27" replacement option (if you are willing to give up an AIO) is so much more expensive.
Well, of course M3 is faster than Intel Macs. The same goes for M2 and M1. Every new chip generation increases the gap between M Macs and Intel Macs simply because of the fact they aren’t updated anymore. More interesting for the purpose of this thread is the difference between M3 and the prior M1-2 generations. The difference between M1 and M2 was small. The difference between M2 and M3 is larger but not the greatest leap forward Apple claims it to be. It is only massive when compared to 4+ year old Intel Macs.