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

Also, I see the discussion about pro vs max being focused on performance, but what about thermals or battery life? Perhaps many professional users would be better off using pro and not max?

People like to pick on this change a lot but these names have been marketing for decades, and other fabs (including TSMC and GloFo) named nodes more advanced than they were purely to look better (iirc - GF 14nm was much closer to Intel's 22nm than to 14nm, Samsung 8nm performed way worse than TSMC N7 etc.) - meanwhile "Intel 10ESF" aka "Intel 7" is actually very similar in most metrics to TSMC N7, though is more amenable to higher clocks.

If anyone wants to loose braincells over this, Wikipedia editors are (still) having an epicly long debate over this since the name was changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:7_nm_process#Intel_7

Is that the reason why the number of neural cores stays the same, do you think?

For example, the regular went from M1 16B, M2 20B, M3 25B; The Max went from M1 57B, M2 67B, M3 92B. On the other hand, the Pro went from M1 33.7B, M2 40B, M3 37B. For the regular, transistor count is up 56% over the M1 and for the Max it's up 61%. However, for the Pro it's only up 10% over the M1 (and slightly down from the M2).

In terms of the cores, the M1 Pro was either 6+2 or 8+2 Performance+Efficiency cores. The M2 Pro became 6+4 or 8+4 so you still had 6 or 8 performance cores. The M3 Pro is either 5+6 or 6+6 so fewer performance cores.

It just seems like the regular has kept the same 4+4 and gone up a bunch in transistors and the Max has gone from 8+2 to 8+4 to 10+4 or 12+4 (a decent step up in cores and transistors). The Pro, on the other hand, hasn't been given the same treatment. It's still a great processor, but it feels like it isn't quite the value that it was. The M1 Pro offered such huge performance with up to 8 performance cores. The M3 Pro feels like a bit of a weak spot in Apple's lineup where it'd be worth deciding between the M3 Max or the regular M3 depending on your needs.

Still, I love Apple Silicon. It's amazing having a laptop that just feels so good to use that I don't think about raw performance numbers. Things just work without pain or heat/fans. I know that's hard to quantify, but my M1 MacBook Pro has felt so different from all the computers I've used before. I was using a 28W Intel 2020 MacBook Pro and my M1 MacBook Pro just felt completely different in terms of performance. I guess part of that is the raw performance with an M1 getting single-core performance that is 85% faster and multi-core performance that's 2.8x faster, but it's also that Apple did it at power/thermal level that means I never hear a fan and my laptop never feels warm. Maybe a big part of it is just that Apple Silicon was such a huge improvement that I'm still in awe of it. Maybe part of it is that I haven't seen what Intel has done since 2020 (and they've been catching up after years of mediocrity). Still, for the first time I feel like I'm waiting on non-CPU stuff for a reason to upgrade (like an OLED or microLED display or something).

The M3 Pro has been neutered - the normal M2 Pro* was 8 Performance + 4 Efficiency cores (same as the Max) whereas the M3 Pro is just 6 P + 6 E cores.

If you want the full complement of CPU cores on the M3, you have to get the Max variant.

*There was a special 'low' end M2 pro that only had 6 + 4 cores.