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A sly comment I saw elsewhere was this gives them a nice bump they can use when the M4 is released and they go back to 4x4 Edit: my personal feeling is this is just a cost savings they are doing like they did with the base SSDs
Probably not because they will compare the M4 to the M2 (because M3 owners are less likely to upgrade).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that was the reason the last couple of years of intel MacBooks had botched thermal solutions. They were really indefensibly bad, but then again: the jump to m1 was enormous. I have a hard time feeling I was the only one conspiratorial enough to suggest something like that.
Knowing how much apple exploits its users a d knowing how apple fanatics are willing to buy whatever and in retrospect… it makes perfect sense. I believe you.
Everyone else is wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s strange about this strategy is it’s less cost effective because Apple is now designing a completely different Pro & Max chiplet, as opposed to just scaling up the base chiplet as done in the M1 & M2. This is a lot of extra complexity they are inflicting on themselves if accurate.
I trust that Apple knows significantly more about the efficiency of their chip design process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s strange about this strategy is it’s less cost effective because Apple is now designing a completely different Pro & Max chiplet, as opposed to just scaling up the base chiplet as done in the M1 & M2. This is a lot of extra complexity they are inflicting on themselves if accurate.
> What’s strange about this strategy is it’s less cost effective because Apple is now designing a completely different Pro & Max chiplet That may be true for the M3, but they undoubtedly are already working on the M4 and M5; they may have bigger differences planned for future releases that require the Pro and Max designs to be separate. Could be that they are just doing the initial work to split the design into two b…
Yeah, that's a downgrade.
A sly comment I saw elsewhere was this gives them a nice bump they can use when the M4 is released and they go back to 4x4 Edit: my personal feeling is this is just a cost savings they are doing like they did with the base SSDs
I was downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that was the reason the last couple of years of intel MacBooks had botched thermal solutions. They were really indefensibly bad, but then again: the jump to m1 was enormous. I have a hard time feeling I was the only one conspiratorial enough to suggest something like that.
The only reason the thermal solutions were indefensibly bad was because Intel's roadmap had nowhere to go but to add more watts and heat. The 2016 MacBook Pro 15" had a perfectly adequate thermal solution for its hardware. Still, in a few short years, Intel's newer processors pushed the design to its thermal limits when they should have been delivering more performance within the same heat and power constraints. Apple had to relent and make the product thicker and add more wattage for the 16" MacBook Pro (Intel).
It's not like Apple massively upgraded the M1 thermal solution and took a victory lap on an artificially unfair playing field. Apple dropped their chips into the same or worse thermal designs and still outperformed Intel. On some benchmarks, the 2020 M1 MacBook Air with no fan beats the 96W 2019 Intel 16" MacBook Pro. [1] For Intel, it was downright embarrassing.
We can't blame Apple for designing an inadequate thermal solution for the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro 15" when it was Intel's own product line that couldn't deliver improved performance without consuming more watts.
Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster over time, not bigger and hotter.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macbook-air-with-m1-chip-beat...
> the M3 Pro system on a chip (SoC) features 150GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to 200GB/s on the earlier M1 Pro and M2 Pro. As for the M3 Max, Apple says it is capable of "up to 400GB/s." Yeah, that's a downgrade.
> the M3 Pro system on a chip (SoC) features 150GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to 200GB/s on the earlier M1 Pro and M2 Pro. As for the M3 Max, Apple says it is capable of "up to 400GB/s." Yeah, that's a downgrade.
Genuine question, from someone that won’t upgrade from their M1 Air: what difference does it make for most users? Where would that extra 50GB/s be felt?
Instead, most of the felt responsiveness on the M1 comes from the insane memory bandwidth. Everything from launching apps to task swapping to garbage collection events in various languages gets a boost from the lower latency and higher bandwidth.
A sly comment I saw elsewhere was this gives them a nice bump they can use when the M4 is released and they go back to 4x4 Edit: my personal feeling is this is just a cost savings they are doing like they did with the base SSDs
I was downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that was the reason the last couple of years of intel MacBooks had botched thermal solutions. They were really indefensibly bad, but then again: the jump to m1 was enormous. I have a hard time feeling I was the only one conspiratorial enough to suggest something like that.
Since they were already on the road to switching to Apple Silicon, it may have not been worthwhile to redesign the cases for the Intel machines to compensate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question, from someone that won’t upgrade from their M1 Air: what difference does it make for most users? Where would that extra 50GB/s be felt?
The M1 doesn't really benchmark in pure CPUs tests much higher that the Intel chips it replaced... it's was an incremental upgrade, not a generational upgrade; in other word, pure CPU benchmark increases would have been realized when/if the nextgen Intel chips were used. Instead, most of the felt responsiveness on the M1 comes from the insane memory bandwidth. Everything from launching apps to task swapping to garbag…