To be technically accurate, for $300 it includes 12 more CPU cores
You can’t simply say "12 more CPU cores" without converting their performance equivalence. Let's make a simple linear estimation:
If the
32-core M3 Ultra has
100p performance (where "p" represents a unit of performance), then the
16-core M4 Max has approximately
75p performance.
Based on this assumption:
- 1 M3 core would contribute 3.125p performance (100p / 32).
- 1 M4 core would contribute 4.6875p performance (75p / 16).
The actual performance difference is
25p, which can be represented as
5.33 additional M4 CPU cores (25p divided by 4.6875p).
A
32-core M3 Ultra CPU has a performance difference equivalent to
5 more M4 Max CPU cores compared to a
16-core M4 Max CPU.
So, the difference between them is
not simply "12 more CPU cores"—it's effectively 5 additional M4 Max CPU cores in terms of performance.
I based my calculation on the 32-core M3 Ultra CPU, but if I had compared it to the 28-core version, the results would have been similar—meaning the difference still wouldn’t be 12 extra cores.
If you’d like, I can redo the calculation after verifying whether the benchmarks were conducted with the 28-core or 32-core M3 Ultra
Of course, this is a
highly simplified and purely linear calculation. Real-world performance depends on workload efficiency, architecture optimizations, and other factors. However, this estimation might help illustrate the relative performance scaling.
To be technically accurate, for $300 it includes an additional 409GB/s memory bandwidth
The memory bandwidth
difference is not 409GB/s, but
309GB/s.
- M3 Ultra has 819GB/s memory bandwidth.
- M4 Max has 510GB/s memory bandwidth.
So, instead of being 2× the bandwidth,
M3 Ultra has 1.6× the bandwidth of M4 Max.