Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#31

Post by starcraft2wol »

ajross wrote: post #12

Live 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'…

It’s a bust in its first round? As others have pointed out, maintaining performance with less power is an improvement.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#32

Post by gigatexal »

JohnBooty wrote: post #30

"The first Apple M3 Pro chip benchmarks have leaked! It’s actually slower than the M2 Max based on margin of error. M3 Pro: 15,173 M2 Max: 15,242" An alternate, and in my opinion more accurate and relevant, way of phrasing this would be: "Very cool! The new *mid-level* chips perform as well (within In what world is this not a good thing? Pretty solid annual incremental upgrade. Of course I understand why people are u…

Exactly. A mid level part being basically equivalent to a top tier part from last generation is a huge win imo.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#33

Post by hyperhello »

michaelt wrote: post #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…

The M1 Pro came in binned 6+2 and I’ll bet most buyers took that configuration to save money or upgrade to Max if they want more performance and RAM. Apple could be providing a good upgrade for what people really bought, and with 6+6 and more single core score it is a real upgrade. Is it worth it? There’s no other improvements than the chip anyway.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#34

Post by bryzaguy »

michaelt wrote: post #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…

As others have speculated, maybe it improves battery life? I’d be curious to know if there’s a meaningful difference.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#35

Post by Toutouxc »

galad87 wrote: post #24
galad87 wrote: post #7

Not surprising at all. the slides in Apple presentation showed exactly this low gain for the M3 Pro, and it was mainly compared to the M1 Pro.

To all those downvoting: the slides in Apple presentation showed exactly this low gain.

I don't think you're being downvoted because you're wrong, but because your comment isn't very useful.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#36

Post by ajross »

JohnBooty wrote: post #30

"The first Apple M3 Pro chip benchmarks have leaked! It’s actually slower than the M2 Max based on margin of error. M3 Pro: 15,173 M2 Max: 15,242" An alternate, and in my opinion more accurate and relevant, way of phrasing this would be: "Very cool! The new *mid-level* chips perform as well (within In what world is this not a good thing? Pretty solid annual incremental upgrade. Of course I understand why people are u…

People are picking on that lede tweet somewhat unfairly. Numbers in the rest of the article say that the same benchmark run between the two "pro" variants improves only 6%. And that's actually quite disappointing for a chip that's supposed to be a on a new semiconductor node. Not a lot of people make a laptop purchase decision over 6%.

> Look at the annual incremental performance increases seen from AMD and Intel and I think these gains compare pretty favorably. I read some 14th-gen Intel benchmarks and they were pretty indistinguishable from 13-gen benchmarks.

Exactly, because Raptor Lake and Alder Lake were fabbed on the same process (10nm++/Intel7, the name changed over the period for marketing reasons). That wasn't supposed to happen here, it was supposed to be new stuff.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#37

Post by superkuh »

davnicwil wrote: post #15

Seems 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 user…

Right. Apple machines have never been top performers. The M* machines are just good compromise machines when you need to be mobile and are energy constrained. Or sometimes, if you spend $6000+, they can have competitive absolute performance specs, re: available RAM and RAM bandwidth for tasks like LLM.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#38

Post by cush »

Last year's benchmarking software benchmarks last years top-tier chips on par with this year's mid-tier chips... Go figure. What's the story here?

Not saying it's wrong, but it's always best to wait for benchmarks of real-world scenarios covering what you're actually trying to do, especially when this launch was so GPU-focused on Transcoding, Ray Tracing, and ML.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#39

Post by leetharris »

megraf wrote: post #27

I have a work issued M1 Max, which has an incredible amount of computational power. I wanted a personal computer, and purchased an identical machine, M1 Max, 64Gig, whatever. I realized 4 days later that it wasn't possible for me to push my personal machine anywhere near this machines limits. I returned it, and bought an extremely cheap ($240?) MacBook Pro, i5 - 2017. It hasn't slowed me down, and my strategy is to u…

The heat, battery life, speakers, microphone, display, connectivity, and more have improved in that time as well. I'd rather have a low end new Mac than a high end old Mac.

Re: First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro

#40

Post by scosman »

gigatexal wrote: post #32
JohnBooty wrote: post #30

"The first Apple M3 Pro chip benchmarks have leaked! It’s actually slower than the M2 Max based on margin of error. M3 Pro: 15,173 M2 Max: 15,242" An alternate, and in my opinion more accurate and relevant, way of phrasing this would be: "Very cool! The new *mid-level* chips perform as well (within In what world is this not a good thing? Pretty solid annual incremental upgrade. Of course I understand why people are u…

Exactly. A mid level part being basically equivalent to a top tier part from last generation is a huge win imo.

Yup. And good bump in single core performance, which you'll notice for most use cases. So really mid level part beats top tier part from last generation.
Post reply on HN