There’s a big performance difference between Apple’s M3 Pro and M3 Max

Compared to the M2, the plain-old M3 doesn’t get any additional cores, so it will rely solely on architectural improvements and clock speed bumps to increase performance — and it has 25 billion transistors, 5 billion more than M2, so there’s still quite a bit of new hardware here. It’s still an 8-core CPU, split evenly between performance and efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU (with a partially disabled 8-core GPU in some entry-level models). Integrated on-package system memory starts at 8GB and maxes out at 24GB, same as the M2.

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The M3 Pro is a 37-billion transistor chip, which is 3 billion fewer than the M2 Pro. That makes sense once you look at the core counts; M2 Pro had eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, plus as many as 19 GPU cores. The M3 Pro still has 12 cores, but it’s split evenly between six performance cores and six efficiency cores, and the GPU tops out at 18 GPU cores. Maximum memory capacity does increase slightly, from 32GB to 36GB.

I still expect The M3 Pro to be an upgrade over the M2 Pro because of the updated architectures involved, but it looks like less of an upgrade than the M3 (which keeps core counts the same) or the M3 Max (which increases them). The M2 Pro and M2 Max used the same CPU core configuration, and my best guess is that the company wanted to create more of an incentive to jump from Pro to Max for people who don’t care about GPU performance.

As for the M3 Max, the 92 billion transistor count makes a huge jump from the M2 Max’s 67 billion. A lot of that is accounted for by the CPU M3 Max, which includes 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, four more performance cores than the M2 Max. The GPU also gets a little bigger, jumping from a max of 38 cores to a max of 40. Maximum memory capacity also goes up from 96GB to 128GB.

Via: Ars Technica