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Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

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Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#271

Post by cmcaleer »

gtirloni wrote: post #174
dmitrygr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to find a laptop with the specification you just mentioned that could last 20 hours on battery. Didn’t.

I'm personally always near a wall socket. My laptop is mostly a desktop. When I'm out and need to use the battery, it's only for a few hours. Do people really need >8h battery life?

It’s a huge nice-to-have. Moving from a decently beefy laptop to a MacBook has been night and day for me in terms of (a) not worrying about windows smart sleep (or whatever it’s called) waking my laptop so it’s warm and dead when I go to use it a few hours later and (b) not worrying about my laptop being dead when I open it after the weekend.

(a) should have been fixed years ago but still randomly happens on my partner’s laptop. (b) is a pain to deal with when you just want to get in to work. No longer having wall wort proximity anxiety every time I go to use my MacBook is really nice.

I’ll move back when laptops catch up though since I miss dual booting.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#272

Post by Detrytus »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #80
throwaway019254 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will need to convince your politicians to lower import duties and taxes. And that $1599 USD is without taxes. So not the whole US has this price. It was always worth for me to travel to Oregon to have zero tax.

Even without the taxes it costs ~$200 more in the EU. Admittedly mandatory 2 year warranty might play a role

This, plus a risk of EUR/USD exchange rate going wrong way in the next year.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#273

Post by KAdot »

miohtama wrote: post #126

> With the M3 family of chips, hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing models the properties of light as it interacts with a scene, allowing apps to create extremely realistic and physically accurate images. This, along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips. Does this mean we can finally play Cyberpunk 20…

The performance is not that great, but you can already play Cyberpunk 2077 on a M2 Pro laptop using Game Porting Toolkit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPJpkRmsceU Keep in mind, it has to do x64 -> ARM64 transition and translate Direct X into Metal. I would expect a native version to work better.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#274

Post by soulofmischief »

mat_epice wrote: post #263
soulofmischief wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're not running ARM images

The point was that there is rarely a reason to not run ARM images, since they’re widely available. If I’m running M3 images on my Ryzen, performance is gonna be horrible, but why would I?

Today? Sure. Thus my statement, which came with a caveat about not running ARM images, the implication being that it's a rare thing today.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#275

Post by blep-arsh »

nextos wrote: post #68
minimaxir wrote: post #4

> Additionally, support for up to 128GB of memory unlocks workflows previously not possible on a laptop, such as AI developers working with even larger transformer models with billions of parameters. The presentation explicitly highlighted this very randomly, without showing how AI development actually works. I know Apple has put more effort into Apple Silicon support for PyTorch but is it there yet?

I don't think it is? But I would love to be wrong. Cheap mobile Nvidia cards outperform regular M2 chips on small learning tasks. M3 Max might be a contender, but Metal is far from CUDA yet? A laptop M3 Max looks like it can compete with a Nvidia 3070. It's an unfair comparison as Nvidia is a huge desktop heat/energy hog and Apple M chips are really efficient. Let's see how desktop M3 chips fare.

Consumer nVidia cards are constrained by their RAM which is inconvenient considering the sizes of popular LLMs. An M2 Ultra basically gives you 100+ GB VRAM which is nice.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#276

Post by jacquesm »

rickette wrote: post #84
stetrain wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been doing more multiples of 6/12 lately, I supposed it's related to the available chip sizes for the LPDDR5X. M2 and M3 go up to 24GB M3 Pro is available in 18GB and 36GB M3 Max is available in 36GB, 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, and 128GB

Why do I need to select the most expensive M3 Max version (the one with 16 cores) to get 48 or 64 gigs of RAM. The M3 Max with 14 cores only allow 36 or 96 gigs. Just let me choose 14 cores and 64 gigs.

Because you'll pay if you're in the market for that much memory.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#277

Post by Daneel_ »

Kye wrote: post #211
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be any gaming laptop from any manufacturer., those are the only ones who still ship with upgradable RAM and dual M.2 slots.

Finding one with a decent screen for anything other than gaming is the trick. I linked it up there, but this is IPS with 100% sRGB, more brightness than most people need, 16:10 (vertical space is nice!), 165Hz, and matte ! Most gaming laptops are...not that. Maybe 50% sRGB on a dim glossy TN screen.

Lenovo Thinkpads? You can absolutely have two m2 slots with a good screen and a solid graphics card. https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P1_Gen_6

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#278

Post by polishTar »

1123581321 wrote: post #236
polishTar wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the reduced memory bandwidth, the M3 pro also loses 2 performance cores for only 2 more efficiency cores. M2 pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores. M3 pro: 6 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores. Not a great trade... I'm not sure the M3 pro can be considered an upgrade

E cores are ~30% faster and P about 15%. So the question would be how much the Es assist when Ps are maxed on each chip. In any other situation, more/better E cores should outperform and extend battery. I’m not saying that means you should want to spend the money.

I love Apple's E cores. It just sucks that the M3 pro gains so few given the reduction in P cores.

Apple's E cores take up ~1/4 the die space of their P core. If the M3 pro lost 2 performance cores but gained 4-8 efficiency cores it'd be a much more reasonable trade.

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#279

Post by iAMkenough »

nateb2022 wrote: post #69
jdprgm wrote: post #11

I don't understand why they don't update the entire lineup whenever a new chip comes out, especially if really only swapping the chip in the macbook pro and imac here. On a separate note does anyone have any insight on how unified memory compares to vram in the context of machine learning performance? Considering an H100 with 80GB costs like $30k a maxed out macbook pro with 128gb unified memory for $5k is interestin…

The M2 Ultra tops out at 800GB/s unified memory bandwidth. A 4090, on the other hand, has 1,008 GB/s. On the PC side, dual-channel DDR4-6400 offers a bandwidth of 102 GB/s.

I guess the question is: in terms of performance per watt, how valuable is the "unified" aspect?

Re: Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

#280

Post by re-thc »

lhl wrote: post #133

Apple launched M2 MBPs only in January. I wonder if Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite (benchmarking now, but not in products until mid-2024) drove some of the timing on this launch: https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/qualcomm-bri...

M2 was late rather than M3 being early.
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