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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

#571

Post by alpaca128 »

parl_match wrote: post #455
fastball wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's the title, but at least in this PR they immediately show a graph with a comparison to both. Presumably it makes more marketing sense to compare to the M1 family up front because most people that bought an M2 last year are probably not going to be upgrading to M3. They are speaking to the people most likely to upgrade.

fwiw, i cant remember the last time i saw a company go back more than a generation in their own comparison. Apple is saying here as much as they're not saying here. M2->M3 may not be a compelling upgrade story.

> i cant remember the last time i saw a company go back more than a generation in their own comparison

Apple likes doing that quite frequently while dumping their "up to X% better" stats on you for minutes.

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

#572

Post by lookitsnicholas »

huytersd wrote: post #495
internet2000 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the amount of people upgrading from an M2 Mac will be close to 0, while there's a lot of Intel stragglers out there.

I’m an Intel strangler because it’s the only way I can have Mac and Windows on the same machine. Am I the only person that really needs this? Parallels has trash performance.

have you tried using VMware Fusion at all?

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

#573

Post by vessenes »

vishnugupta wrote: post #465
internet2000 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the amount of people upgrading from an M2 Mac will be close to 0, while there's a lot of Intel stragglers out there.

Intel straggler here. My laptop just completed 5 years. It says battery needs replacing which I’ve been putting off for a year. The thing is I have 32G which is quite good IMO so I’ll probably use it for two years at least.

You're just hurting yourself. Even the M1 Pro is like 3x faster than that Intel laptop. Plus so many tiny things like sleep/wake, power management, heat.. I really can't stress enough what a tectonic change the M1 was over Intel.

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

#575

Post by dansalvato »

mdasen wrote: post #210

An interesting thing about the M2 Pro and M3 Pro is that they shifted away from being mostly performance cores. The M1 Pro was either 6+2 P+E or 8+2 P+E. The M2 Pro was either 6+4 or 8+4. The new M3 Pro is either 5+6 or 6+6. Apple has been shifting away from performance cores with each generation. M1 Pro: 75-80% P-cores; M2 Pro: 60-67% P-cores; M3 Pro: 45-50% P-cores. This shows up when you look at Geekbench results.…

I think your last paragraph sounds about right. The Max is a compromise on battery life for those who want the absolute most possible performance, but I think Apple is seeing a much wider audience get the Pro chip. Anecdotally, whenever I see a tech person mention their Apple silicon device, it's almost always a Pro chip. I'm sure only a small fraction of that user base is hitting all cores with a full load on a regular basis, but a majority are certainly enjoying a killer battery life.

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

#576

Post by VancouverMan »

latchkey wrote: post #326
rewmie wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any reason for not upgrading? Why is this sort of question always framed as if people have to provide a justification for not buying a new model, as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable? We live in a day and age where hardware bought a decade ago still packs enough punch to run most of today's software without any hiccup. Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something…

It is an honest question. For some background in my thinking, it is because today's announcement really focused on Intel users. My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there, like the OP, who haven't upgraded yet, hence the focus. As a result, I'm genuinely curious why this person hasn't upgraded. And for my own personal experience, the upgrade…

I've been holding off on upgrading some older Intel Mac minis I have while waiting for the memory situation to improve, but so far it hasn't.

Ideally, I'd consolidate these older systems into one new Mac mini, or even a Mac Studio.

I'd like at least 64 GB of memory, at a reasonable price.

The latest Mac mini maxes out at only 32 GB of RAM, if I'm remembering it right.

I think the latest low-end Mac Studio could be upgraded to 64 GB of memory, but the last time I priced it, this upgrade cost more than I'd been expecting. It also put the overall cost above what I'd prefer to pay.

While I'd like to keep using a Mac, it's looking more and more like I'd be better off just building a PC, where I could likely get comparable enough processing performance, but far more memory (and storage) at a lower cost.

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

#577

Post by cztomsik »

spookie wrote: post #329
lukasb wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really directly comparable due to the architectural differences, right? For pure rendering workflows I'm sure the 4090 is faster, but for anything that hits the CPU ...

Yes, the tiled-based architecture of their "GPU" is undeniably less performant. Even comparing to lesser GPUs.

Why exactly is tile-based a bad idea? Most rendering engines are tile-aware already.

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

#579

Post by rickdeckard »

threeseed wrote: post #476
ChuckMcM wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering now if Apple tracks this sort of stuff in their released machines. I know my iPad always asks me if I want to send stats to Apple (and I always say no). So let's say that enough people do, then do they have a good idea of how often all the performance cores are used? Max memory B/W consumed? Stuff like that. Back when I was at Intel there were always interesting tradeoffs between available silicon/therm…

Apple shares anonymous usage data by default on all their operating systems and users are asked again on every major update. Given that there has never been any public incidents about it and what we know about similar defaults I would be surprised if Apple is getting less than 95% opt-in rate. But I suspect at high-end they only really care about the performance of a few dozen professional apps e.g. Logic or Final Cu…

> Given that there has never been any public incidents about it and what we know about similar defaults I would be surprised if Apple is getting less than 95% opt-in rate.

A 95% opt-in rate is INSANELY high for any type of usage-stat opt-in, everything above 50% is usually outstanding.

What is known about "similar defaults"?

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