Waiting for the claims that less performance is a good thing.
You're performing it wrong
First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
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Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#12Live by benchmark results and slick performance marketing, die by benchmark results and slick performance marketing. The market is ruthless; if you aren't delivering more of what you promised made you great last year, you're failing.
Really the underlying news here, which the article doesn't really treat with, is that TSMC's 3nm node is sort of a bust. It's not looking like a full node upgrade at all (something that's been reasonably clear for a few months based on the leaked pitch/density numbers). They still have a comfortable lead over Intel, but scaling limitations come for us all eventually.
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#13Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#14It was a deliberate choice to differentiate between Pro and Max
There's a 45% performance uplift between M2 Max and M3 Max in benchmarks.
You still get more performance between M2 Pro and M3 Pro. And you get significantly more if you're upgrading from M1 Pro.
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#15Seems to be based on the perspective that the focus is indeed on absolute performance gains rather than performance per power draw.
Based on the range of devices the M chips will be used for both immediately and in future it's not at all obvious that should be true. Think about the vision pro. Name of the game there is workable performance / battery tradeoff, not maxing out raw performance.
Same is true for most users of macbooks frankly, including (lots of) engineers using pros.
It wouldn't be surprising to me that an acceptable outcome of the shift to the new node was maintaining performance of M2 with gains in battery life. More performance will inevitably come with M4 etc anyway.
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#16Waiting for the claims that less performance is a good thing.
Low performance gains for a mid-level chip are totally a good thing if it's significantly more efficient. (I haven't seen any numbers for M3 Pro yet, but here's hoping.)
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#17> The M2 was launched in June 2022, but the Pro and Max launched in January 2023. They're not even a year old and have already been relegated to the trash heap of silicon history. It stands to reason the M2 chips didn't sell very well, so Apple wanted to get the M3 out ASAP to reverse that trend.
That theory would make a lot more sense if the M3 was providing a big performance boost.
Instead buyers of the M3 Pro get 25% less memory bandwidth than the M2 Pro, and two of the performance cores swapped for efficiency cores. Not much to reinvigorate sales by motivating M2 Pro users to upgrade other than a higher number.
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#18Article about a clickbait tweet, comparing M2 Max against M3 Pro.
Even so, my regret over buying an M2 Pro just before the M3 was released decreases each day. In fact, it might start going negative such that I’m happy to have bought the M2.
To be honest, I was in the same boat with M1 -> M2. Not that the M2 wasn’t an improvement, and as pointed out this article compares M2 Max to M3 Pro, it’s just that M1 was so much better than my i7 based MBP that the gains made by M2 weren’t significant enough to worry.
Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#19That's not surprising at all? The M3 Pro has 2 fewer performance cores than the M2 Pro.
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Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
#20I wonder what kind of usage metrics Apple has that led it to reduce (8 down to 6) the number of performance cores and increase (4 up to 6) the number of efficiency cores on the M3 Pro? Or the reduction (25%) in memory bandwidth?
Maybe they're trying to get people to buy the Max version? The spec differences are interesting:
M3 Pro, 6 efficiency, 6 performance, 18 GPU, 16 Neural cores, 150GB/s memory bandwidth
M3 Max 1, 4 efficiency, 10 performance, 30 GPU, 16 Neural cores, 300GB/s memory bandwidth
M3 Max 2, 4 efficiency, 12 performance, 40 GPU, 16 Neural cores, 400GB/s memory bandwidth
They reduced the number of efficiency cores on the more powerful models. I'm not sure that makes sense to me.
Edited to add: Why do the number of neural cores (16) stay the same across all 3 CPU levels?