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

M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 419 posts

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#41

Post by fsociety »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #8

Feels like we’ve gone from “it’s just better, it’s obviously better you can see with your eyes and feel it as you use it” when M1/2 dropped. To trying to justify why the M3 is 20% faster than the M1 and the M2 was also 20% faster than the M1 and weirdly Apple is only comparing it to their older processor. Like people, maybe it’s just an underwhelming update… no need to pretend it’s not.

Why would you market to people who just bought an M2 Pro this year? Those who are going to upgrade, will anyways. Seems silly to market to people telling them to buy new multi-thousand dollar laptops every year.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#42

Post by troupe »

stuff4ben wrote: post #2

This is good to know. I worry about the longevity of these new M-series processors from Apple since they're so (relatively) new. What is the usable lifespan of a base M1-MacBook Air for example? I guess I'll find out since I just bought one for my kid who is a junior in HS and I'm hoping this will last until they graduate college.

My experience with buying lower end intel based Macbook Airs is that they generally last 10 years before we replace them. Usually this comes down to asking if it is worth replacing the battery or better to invest in a new machine. I'm assuming the M processors will be similar.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#43

Post by xattt »

solardev wrote: post #26
Zetobal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tick and some people... especially marketing departments want to sell it as a tock.

Wait, is that the sound the minute hand makes?! I never realized.

Assuming you don’t have a single-hand clock.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#44

Post by whynotminot »

Given what appears to be a reduced performance focus for the M3 Pro chip, and the M3 Max has taken off to the stratosphere in both performance and unfortunately price, I’m wondering if for a lot of professional users if getting a refurbished M2 Max machine is actually the best price to performance move right now.

Really looking forward to some detailed M3 Pro analysis.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#45

Post by strangescript »

pohl wrote: post #21
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #8

Feels like we’ve gone from “it’s just better, it’s obviously better you can see with your eyes and feel it as you use it” when M1/2 dropped. To trying to justify why the M3 is 20% faster than the M1 and the M2 was also 20% faster than the M1 and weirdly Apple is only comparing it to their older processor. Like people, maybe it’s just an underwhelming update… no need to pretend it’s not.

The M3 Max performs similarly to an M2 Ultra. That feels pretty big to me as a current M1 Max user.

Exactly, how are people overlooking this. Its like saying I am going to drop a near silent windows laptop, that is thin and cool, oh and has BETTER performance than last year's desktop windows machines.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#46

Post by stetrain »

steve1977 wrote: post #38
pohl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M3 Max performs similarly to an M2 Ultra. That feels pretty big to me as a current M1 Max user.

It’s also more expensive than a M2 Max or M1 Max if I’m not mistaken.

14" MBP with the highest M2 Max configuration, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD was $3899.

A new model with the same configuration is also $3899.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#47

Post by deagle50 »

jmull wrote: post #15

It seems like the M3 favors efficiency and thermals over raw power. This makes sense for the devices they've put it in. I wonder if we're going to see different processors (M3X or M4) for the next release of the pro desktops, that favor power over thermals and efficiency? Maybe there will be a kind of tick-tock, with odd numbered processors favoring efficiency and even numbered processors for power? M3, M5, M7 for th…

Apple is favoring yields and margin over everything else. They cut the M3 Pro as much as possible so it's half the area of the M2 Pro.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#48

Post by stetrain »

mcphage wrote: post #30
runjake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I think you set your expectations too high. 2. I assume Apple compared the M3 to M1 because most of the customers they are targeting are still on the M1. M2 customers bought a computer less than a year ago and that pool of people is relatively small compared to the number on M1 today.

> I think you set your expectations too high. Well, they did announce it in an event called "scary fast". I mean there's always marketing exaggeration, but I did expect more than trying to understand if it's even faster at all . Otherwise I'm not entirely certain what the point was.

It felt like half the event was listing different types of workload and saying that the new chips were 15-20% faster than the M2 generation at that task, and 30-40% faster than the M1 generation.

The only real exception to that is the M3 Pro, which is closer to the performance of the M2 Pro at a reduced core count.

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#49

Post by vbezhenar »

solardev wrote: post #26
Zetobal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tick and some people... especially marketing departments want to sell it as a tock.

Wait, is that the sound the minute hand makes?! I never realized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick–tock_model

Re: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

#50

Post by pier25 »

scrlk wrote: post #9
cubefox wrote: post #3

This seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?

It's a mixture of several problems: * TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive) * Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years * Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro) I don't expect there to be a M1 style generational l…

The GPU is increasing a lot though.

Another point is the CPU improvements are constant. In about two years the base M3 is now on par with the M1 Max.

Post reply on HN