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

[chucker23n1]

I think apple telegraphs how often they expect you to upgrade with the length of applecare. For tablets/phones it’s every 2 years and for computers it’s every 3.

3 years ago, it’s still intel. all the m1 pros / max are still under applecare warranty. The upgrade cycle is probably next year.

This used to be true, but these days, you can also just buy AppleCare+ as a monthly or annual subscription.

I also can't find it right now, but I believe a recent environmental report of theirs said Macs typically get upgraded every four to five years.

But, yeah, I agree with your point. The key audience for M3 Pro are people who still have an Intel Mac.

 

[Deep_learned_mistake]

I just want to watch streams while working without my laptop (mid 2018) sounding like a bloody cyclone. This is the year I upgrade and the M3 pro 512/12c/36gb seems like an excellent choice, stop hating.

 

[smulji]

The problem is that silicon competitors are improving at a much faster rate so Apple's watt/performance superiority will be very short lived if it continues at this pace.

Exactly this. Apple has a two-year window until all other major silico designers are using advanced 3nm process technology.

 

[Neil J. Squillante]

The new lineup is not more balanced but just different. The high performance counts should have gone 4-8-12 instead we have 4-6-12 which is a substantially less balanced configuration. GPU performance is also a smaller incremente form M3 to M3 Pro (vs M2 to M2 Pro) because of the loss of a GPU core and the cutting 50% from the memory bus.

It’s fine if you want to defend this but you are not really defending a more balanced lineup, you are defending Apples margins going up.

Apple seems to prioritize power efficiency more than the high performance symmetry you would prefer. You’re correct about margins increasing. I can‘t help but wonder if Apple has an internal goal of 50% margins given the recent rise. I thought Apple silicon would reduce prices while maintaining margins but so far Apple has chosen to increase margins. Perhaps the rumored cheap MacBook will restore margins back to historical norms. I believe the rumors because Apple needs more users for its now substantial services business.

 

[TallManNY]

I honestly think most Mac users don’t care about ‘performance’ or ‘cores’. They want to be seen drinking coffee with the latest MacBook. Only way to show you have the latest is buy black. So base black M3pro will be the biggest seller. Look at MKBHD, he’s even said his current MacBook is great. But he will ‘need’ black. That’s the majority of buyers.

MKBHD is probably pulling $1 million a year on his channel, so if he decides to upgrade his M1 Max machine, I ain't questioning him.

That said, nearly everyone I know uses a Mac as their personal machine. But not a single person I know will upgrade from an M1 machine to an M3 machine. But then I'm not friends with anyone as rich as MKBHD.

 

[EdwardC]

So, I have a M2 Pro base Mini which I bought on sale at MicroCenter for $1,099.00. I have a M1 Mini 16GB / 256 which the pro replaced. I did not sell the M1 but put it in the box my Pro came in. I use these for my office and the use is typical e-mail, Word or Pages, PDF work and CAD use. I pull the M1 out every few weeks to update and can honestly say I'm still impressed by its speed. Obviously I probably didn't need the M2 Pro but being a Mac man since '95 the price seemed too good to pass up. I suspect these will last me for years to come (I have Apple Care on them as well). I will admit for heavy CAD I use a HP Z2 / Xeon / Quadro system and it's a beast but I do like my little Mini's that seem to defy their size and do so with a complete lack of sound. Well done Apple, not sure the M3 is even a worthy upgrade though for anyone using a M1 Mini as I do (probably most as well).

 

[bcortens]

Apple seems to prioritize power efficiency more than the high performance symmetry you would prefer. You’re correct about margins increasing. I can‘t help but wonder if Apple has an internal goal of 50% margins given the recent rise. I thought Apple silicon would reduce prices while maintaining margins but so far Apple has chosen to increase margins. Perhaps the rumored cheap MacBook will restore margins back to historical norms. I believe the rumors because Apple needs more users for its now substantial services business.

The thing is, no one was really complaining about battery life in M1 Pro or M2 Pro. I suspect people will now come out of the woodwork to praise this decision and talk about how poor their battery life is but that is post-hoc justificaron trying to rationalize and defend everything Apple does.

Further, if battery life was such an issue they would not have made the m3 max the way they did.

Sometimes Apple makes a consumer hostile decision that is mostly aimed at increasing margins, they are a company after all.

 

[jkmoses]

Remember when we cared very little about the processor as long as it was an upgrade from the one we previously owned? And Apple told us that processor specs mattered very little to what makes a machine great. Why are we so obsessed about processors again? Because they can’t think of any user-facing “wow” features anymore? I remember when we were excited every year to see the NEW version of iTunes! Or the new iMac! Are we back to chasing performance improvements because we’ve lost our imagination on user experience? Looks like it!

 

[ender78]

Jeez what's wrong with people who have no expectations nowadays. Everyone should be demanding the fastest and most powerful processor from Apple, not being satisfied with lacklustre crap that just manage to scrap past.

What is it with people that have completely unreasonable expectations. Do you even have the slightest idea of how much cost/engineering effort there is to manufacture a cpu on the 3nm process. What it takes to get a measly 5% more out of the silicon.

It would be great if CPU and GPU performance wend up by 50% every year. The only thing that is stopping that from happening is our current technological knowhow. What TSMC is manufacturing for Apple today is at the limit of the silicon sectors abilities.

How much better is the Intel i9-14900k than the i9-13900k?

 

[Bcn]

Almost one year ago, so many were writing, m2 no thanks, we will wait for the super fast m3 and better battery. I was also waiting, but will be happy to upgrade from my MacBook Pro 2014.

 

[shawnforever]

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

Incremental change is great. Most of us keep MacBook Pros for years and years. I'm upgrading from the 2017 MBP (Intel) to the 2023 M3 Pro 14", so that's a lot of big leaps and minor upgrades all combined into one. Can't wait until it arrives on Tuesday.

 

[john123]

I’m eager to see real world battery numbers. If that tradeoff in performance cores for efficiency cores buys me an extra hour of real world use, that would be of more value to me than a larger percentage increase in processor benchmarks.

 

[hans1972]

Many folks only see Apple as a "do no wrong" company so will defend all the product decisions regardless of how asinine they are. I mean, 8/256 as the base in 2023...

I have 256Gb SSD. 143 Gb free. I even have a Windows virtual machine installed.

With iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library, Apple Music and other streaming services, a lot of us don't need local storage.

 

[ender78]

It's rushed because of Intel Meteor and Snapdragon X both rumored to be faster than M2.

On the ATP podcast, there was a discussion that in order to ship now, TSMC had to be in high volume mode for the M3 back in April. There is nothing that can be rushed in this industry.

Snapdragon X is not expected to be release for another 4-6 months, and it is barely faster than a CPU that was released over a year go. This means that today, Qualcomm is 18 months or so behind Apple. Competition is good. Having competition in the Arm space will help keep Apple pushing the envelope.

 

[Orange Bat]

Incremental change is great. Most of us keep MacBook Pros for years and years. I'm upgrading from the 2017 MBP (Intel) to the 2023 M3 Pro 14", so that's a lot of big leaps and minor upgrades all combined into one. Can't wait until it arrives on Tuesday.

My M1 was a significant step up from my 2015 Intel Mac. The M-series chips really feel like a leap more than an incremental update over Intel. While the speed from M1 to M2 is barely noticeable to me, the switch to M1 was extremely noticeable. Enjoy!

 

[bcortens]

What is it with people that have completely unreasonable expectations. Do you even have the slightest idea of how much cost/engineering effort there is to manufacture a cpu on the 3nm process. What it takes to get a measly 5% more out of the silicon.

It would be great if CPU and GPU performance wend up by 50% every year. The only thing that is stopping that from happening is our current technological knowhow. What TSMC is manufacturing for Apple today is at the limit of the silicon sectors abilities.

How much better is the Intel i9-14900k than the i9-13900k?

It isn’t about absolute increasss, though those are lower than they should be. It is also about the fact that Apple moved the Pro down the performance stack without changing the price. All the arguments about how N3 cost money apply equally to M3 and M3 Max but we aren’t seeing anyone call for them to be decontented to make up for this cost.

If people were consistent you’d have a point. If Apple had also removed some corres from the base M3 and the Max you’d have a point. Making one of their products worse relative to its position in prior years is not defensible if the same arguments don’t work when looking at the rest of the product stack

 

[ric22]

Show us on the doll where Apple touched you...

I buy Apple products for home and work purposes knowing they're expensive. I can afford them. 🤷🏼‍♂️ Doesn't mean I'm not intelligent enough to grasp that they're expensive for what they are. I'm sorry for you if you aren't. 😞

 

[ender78]

That assumes that the e-cores don't factor into Geekbench results, which I don't believe is true.

The single core results are for the P-Cores, the Multi-Core are the entire CPU. As long as the multi-core is higher in aggregate it's an improvement.

Apple decided that for typical workloads, its was better to have more E-Cores. They have far more data on what makes a great CPU than those here that have the unfounded opinions that "MORE POWER" is the only way forward.

 

[bcortens]

I’m going to add that two things can be true, M3 Pro is a great product, M3 Pro is a worse value than M2 Pro was.

 

[bcortens]

The single core results are for the P-Cores, the Multi-Core are the entire CPU. As long as the multi-core is higher in aggregate it's an improvement.

Apple decided that for typical workloads, its was better to have more E-Cores. They have far more data on what makes a great CPU than those here that have the unfounded opinions that "MORE POWER" is the only way forward.

Why does the m3 max exist in the configuration it does then? Why isn’t it a 8p + 8e core chip?

 

[djphat2000]

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.

Too many people expect double the performance, and at a lower price.
And still state how much faster intel "is" when running at 300 watts.
People are strange.

 

[Zeke92]

Not great—this reworking of where the m3 Pro stands is mostly so that users will feel compelled to get the M3 Max chips, at a lot more money for Apple.

It's their choice to make, but it's hard not to see this as a way to squeeze all the MBP users who actually want powerful chips.

I do feel as if the current configurations of the MacBook Pro laptops are designed in a way to push people toward the M3 Max chip even if they'd on't need it, but to frame the M3 Pro as not a powerful chip is disingenuous. The M2 Pro is a powerful chip and the M3 Pro is 6% and 15% faster than the M2.

 

[0lf]

The thing is, no one was really complaining about battery life in M1 Pro or M2 Pro. I suspect people will now come out of the woodwork to praise this decision and talk about how poor their battery life is but that is post-hoc justificaron trying to rationalize and defend everything Apple does.

Further, if battery life was such an issue they would not have made the m3 max the way they did.

Sometimes Apple makes a consumer hostile decision that is mostly aimed at increasing margins, they are a company after all.

The thing is, no one was really complaining about M2 pro performance either…

 

[kiranmk2]

People seem to be either "M3 is a fantastic upgrade over the M1/M2" or the "M3 is a complete flop" but I would argue both are partly correct. From the GB6 benchmarks so far I'm very impressed with the M3 and M3 Max scores. However, I'm very disappointed by the M3 Pro score highlighted in this article. If you look at the GB6 benchmarks across generations, you can clearly see that in CPU the M3 Pro has fallen further behind M3 Max and the base M3 is snapping at it's heels (and I would imagine the M3 base will be even closer to the entry level binned M3 Pro chip), meaning that the M3 Pro machines offer less value than they did. (In the graph below the green line (Pro) is getting closer to the red line (base) and falling behind the blue line (Max).

Even with the improved Max performance, you will need to pay 10% more given that M3 Max now starts with a binned version. To my mind the Pro has been atificially held back to encourage more upgrades to the Max. Apple maintains cutting edge performance, but will make you pay ever more for it.

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.

Because when you look at the base model, that has a 15% increase in multicore so why hobble the Pro chip?

This whole line up screams rushed

On the contrary, it has been carefully planned to give a good boost to the headline performance (Max) whilst driving more people to buy more expensive models (13"MBP --> 14 "MBP, M3 Pro --> M3 Max) to increase revenues

A single unverified benchmark reported by a click bait YouTube pinhead? Who is foolish enough to believe this at face value? Apparently more than I can imagine…

It matches the expectations from the reduced core counts and the presentation stating 20% increase over M1 Pro (when the M2 Pro was also 20% better than the M1 Pro)

Certainly, but I wonder if the Mini will also be re-segmented like the laptops have been. The two versions of the Studio were pretty different, especially on price, so hopefully Apple won't gimp the Max Studio (compared to the Ultra) like they did the M3 Pro laptops.

I can see the M3 studio starting with the binned M3 Max chip. Makes no sense not to give it the Ultra as when would anyone pick the studio over an MBP?

I'll wait til the reviewers get their m3 Macs before I decide.

From the sounds of it only the M3 and M3 Max versions have been sent out for review...

A totally unfair comparison. The M1 introduced a revolutionary laptop computer CPU+GPU+Unified Memory architecture. All future M-series are just evolutions of this technology so there is no reason to ever expect another such performance, or power improvement as was witnessed going from Intel x86 to Apple's M-series.

If that was the case, why has the M3 Max received such a good performance boost?

 

[bcortens]

The thing is, no one was really complaining about M2 pro performance either…

And yet, when a new generation is introduced, we normally expect it to be a straightforward next step, the M3 Pro has too many asterisks to be a straightforward next step.