M3 Pro Chip Barely Faster Than M2 Pro in Unverified Benchmark Result

[Orange Bat]

Does any of this matter? What does “faster” mean anyway?

I have an M1 Mini and an M2 MacBook Air and I don’t notice a functional difference between the two. While I’m sure the M2 is “faster”, who cares? I’m able to do my work (software development) without any hang-ups or bottlenecks. The little video editing I do has no problems, either.

For Apple, the problem is that the chips have been great right from their introduction and no one is complaining about the slowness of their M1 yet. IMO very few will upgrade from an M2 or M1 machine and only will if they need a new computer.

 

[3xBoom]

MacRumors seem to be on a mission with m3... Or is it its Sunday crew full of secret Windoze fans at work here?

 

[chucker23n1]

I think most people should just wait for the base M3 Airs

That's assuming the Air will get the M3 at all. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't, because yield issues seem to be driving a lot of decisions with the M3: don't offer it at all (at least at first) on by far the biggest-selling Mac, and do max out the cores on the high end, which doesn't sell much.

So, the Air might skip the M3 and get the M4 next summer, with a different TSMC process variant. They might call that SoC the M3 Plus or whatever.

Does any of this matter? What does “faster” mean anyway?

I have an M1 Mini and an M2 MacBook Air and I don’t notice a functional difference between the two. While I’m sure the M2 is “faster”, who cares? I’m able to do my work (software development) without any hang-ups or bottlenecks.

I also do software development, on my M1 Pro, and while I'm still content with it, I can totally push it near its limits. So, sure, it does matter. At some point, I'll upgrade to an M4 Pro or M5 Pro, and it'll matter if it's 10% faster or 50%.

 

[chucker23n1]

MacRumors seem to be on a mission with m3... Or is it its Sunday crew full of secret Windoze fans at work here?

It was announced Monday, and actual reviews will probably come tomorrow, so every piece of info gets gathered.

 

[buckwheet]

Does any of this matter? What does “faster” mean anyway?

I have an M1 Mini and an M2 MacBook Air and I don’t notice a functional difference between the two. While I’m sure the M2 is “faster”, who cares? I’m able to do my work (software development) without any hang-ups or bottlenecks. The little video editing I do has no problems, either.

For Apple, the problem is that the chips have been great right from their introduction and no one is complaining about the slowness of their M1 yet. IMO very few will upgrade from an M2 or M1 machine and only will if they need a new computer.

Honestly, I thought it was pretty much common knowledge already that the M3 is and upgrade for M1 users. From what I've seen so far it looks like a good upgrade from my M1 Pro, so I'll be considering it in the New Year (and I *love* that new black colour). Personally, I have no interest in upgrading every year anyway.

 

[aapl owner]

Yes this is what I call Mac passion

Many of us love Mac's because they are not Wintel so they do not get blazing hot for no reason, have great battery life, have awesome displays, have an awesome track pad (every Wintel has a terrible track pad especially Dell's, ugg it is so bad) and yeah are not vulnerable to literally >>100,000's viruses. But yeah we only have them because it's the cool thing to be seen with.

 

[Bodhitree]

It was expected though, just from the core counts, that the M3 Pro wouldn’t improve much on the M2 Pro in cpu benchmarks. Which leaves the gpu, the hardware ray tracing and mesh shading, and all the smaller improvements to the soc. Plus the fact that it’s the latest and will get longer support. Seems a perfectly fair reason to want one, to me.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Because Apple bribes the tech space sending them goodie bags before the event.

Intel doesn't have this type of money.

This is a completely off-topic, and incorrect, rant.

I have college buddy that works in the "tech space" and he has loads of free crap/junk he has gotten from Intel, including free hardware, and still does. I have an Intel Arc-branded stress-relief pig, wearing sunglasses, on my desk courtesy of him.

He's not a YouTuber.

 

[rp2011]

Since the beginning of the consumer computer market, salespeople and pundits have been telling people that their computers are "fast enough", which "could" be true for that particular moment, for a particular section of consumers, at that particular moment with currently available software and hardware, but the industry does not sit still. At least you better not sit still if you want to continue to exist as a viable business. Ask Intel. Complacency is the biggest pitfall by far, and if any computer company ever listened to that myopic line of reasoning, they better believe they would be out of business soon after. Let's remember that even with a virtual monopoly Intel dragging their feet, and with consumers having very little choice, Intel is in a whole lot of trouble with that mindset.
If that line of reasoning was actually true, most of us would still be using ten or twenty year old machines.

 

[JamesHolden]

That's the same mentality I heard when Apple was still using PowerPC. That didn't go the way Apple wanted.

Just because Apple may have the advantage now doesn't mean they always will. Never rest on your laurels.

Agreed. The industry is littered with carcasses of chips various companies (including Apple, more than once now…) touted as the fastest, most efficient, the best. And yet Intel remains.

 

[mrmister]

That's assuming the Air will get the M3 at all. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't, because yield issues seem to be driving a lot of decisions with the M3: don't offer it at all (at least at first) on by far the biggest-selling Mac, and do max out the cores on the high end, which doesn't sell much.

So, the Air might skip the M3 and get the M4 next summer, with a different TSMC process variant. They might call that SoC the M3 Plus or whatever.

The MBA 13, by far Apple's best selling laptop, hasn't been updated since June 2022.

Yes, it will get an M3 in 2024.

The M4 will not arrive so soon as six months from now, either. Come on people, try.

(edit note—I screwed up and said 2023, but obvs I meant 2024, apologies.)

 

[JippaLippa]

That's a big "OOF" moment

 

[chucker23n1]

The MBA 13, by far Apple's best selling laptop, hasn't been updated since June 2022.

Yes, it will get an M3 in 2023.

Well, eight weeks to go!

The M4 will not arrive so soon as six months from now, either. Come on people, try.

If it does get an M3, odds are it's either because of a significant change in production at TSMC, or it's an M3 with a different process.

 

[bcortens]

14% and 6% are decent improvements. Why would you expect more for an annual upgrade? We don't need a revolution every year...just incremental improvements.

If they had added transistors instead of removing them we would have seen multicore improvements that were in line with the m2-m3
Apple moved the Pro to a lower performance tier but kept the same number of transistors

 

[A7ibaba]

More cores = more $ . Less cores = more $. Profit

 

[woolypants]

What is happening in Apple right now?

The only theory I have is that this is a tock release, and that M4 will be a massive tick improvement.

Maybe Apple's just resigned to poor sales of MacBooks right now and thought, ah, why not? Let's just get this 3nm first-gen out there. We'll get serious again when the market picks up a little.

 

[bcortens]

It never made sense to have the Pro so close to the Max. Still happy with the speed of my M1 Pro, I‘m only updating to the M3 Pro because I‘m going from 14“ to 16“.

With the Max moving to 12 performance cores they could have left the Pro with 8 performance cores and then the Pro would have been a perfect midpoint between standard and max.

They are doing this cynically for margins and to push people up the stack. They cut 3 billion transistors, each transistor is cheaper so the new pro is a significantly higher margin chip for Apple. This is not about a more balanced machine but about a higher margin machine.

 

[VisceralRealist]

Yes, it will get an M3 in 2023.

No, it won't.

The 13" MBA will not be updated without the 15" MBA being updated and the latter was updated too recently for that to happen.

 

[jmckenzie]

Do y’all really update your computers every three years?? I’m relatively cheap, so I update my personal Macs about every 5-6 years, but even for the corporate fleet I help manage, I have used 5 years as the rule of thumb, and the only time I went at all less than that was after the Apple Silicon transition — most people went from 2018 MacBooks to 2022 MacBooks. That, they certainly did notice…. But I don’t even think it was that life-changing for some users.

I’m hopeful that AS generations will show more year-over-year improvements than Intel was doing, but even so… even for static design work, there are so many other factors than raw chip computational speed that come into play to make the difference less than benchmarks alone would indicate.

 

[TheRoxyTheatre]

Honestly, I thought it was pretty much common knowledge already that the M3 is and upgrade for M1 users. From what I've seen so far it looks like a good upgrade from my M1 Pro, so I'll be considering it in the New Year (and I *love* that new black colour). Personally, I have no interest in upgrading every year anyway.

Questionable upgrade at best. Maybe if you’re editing 8K videos, otherwise, the only difference you’re likely see is a reduction to your bank account for a performance increase you can’t feel in day to day use.

 

[topmounter]

How do you know it's a flop?

Considering what it is, a spec bump, the M3 is definitely not a 'flop'. The 'flop' is Apple jacking up expectations by making the M3 launch an 'event' (albeit prerecorded) and not announcing anything other than a mere spec bump in a superficial attempt to jack up revenues and investor sentiment after an unimpressive quarter.

 

[Mainsail]

No, it won't.

The 13" MBA will not be updated without the 15" MBA being updated and the latter was updated too recently for that to happen.

I tend to agree. I think the M2 MBA line-up (13" and 15") will get the M3 update in June 2024 at WWDC. That will give the 15" MBA one full year run with the M2 chip.

 

[bcortens]

TLDR : Apple fixed the Apple Silicon lineup.

Between a Max and a Pro chip, there was close to no CPU difference. Now there is. It sucks for the M3 line, but it should have been like that from the very beginning.

Let's put it in another perspective : The base M3 chip is very close to my base M2 Pro chip in multi-core, but it is faster in single-core...

This is not good though. Sure celebrate decontenting all you want but it doesn’t change what it is. The pro is a worse product relative to the max and standard m3 than it used to be.

The m3 pro has 37 billion transistors (3 billion less than m2 pro) the max is at 96 billion. Each m3 pro costs Apple significantly less than the m2 pro and this they are increasing margins…

If they had kept the same number of high performance CPU cores on the Pro there would still be 33% uplift in moving to the max. The pro could have been a midway point between standard and max - instead it is only a 40% than standard for CPU performance.
Very disappointed

 

[bcortens]

Not true. The M3 lineup is a correction of a mistake Apple made originally in making the M1/2 Pro and M1/2 Max too close to each other and confusing people with the MBA’s and 13” MBP. They screwed up their lineup which required the fix with the M3 line. You can’t fix things if it weren’t broken. This lineup is an admission from Apple that their previous segmentation strategy sucked.

Glad you’re happy to pay for apples increased margins, good for you cheering on making things worse (relative to the rest of the lineup) for the same money

 

[bcortens]

It doesn't and shouldn't matter the performance increase from the previous generation... what Apple is doing is filling out a huge performance hole in their line up. And if that means the Pro only gets a 14% increase while the other variants get a larger increase, then that's what was needed.

The M1/2 Pro and M1/2 Max had the same CPU performance (they were basically only different in GPU performance). In what CPU world is this normal? At some point Apple was going to have to better differentiate these SoC's... this is how they do that. Apple has moved from 2 CPU designs; M3, Pro, Pro+(Max) to 3 designs, M3, Pro, Max.

If they had kept the pro at 8+4 they would have achieved this exact aim without unnecessarily decontenting the pro. The max got more cores, there was no need to decontent the pro as well.