Reading this makes me feel extra happy with my M1 Pro😁
I have an m1 pro MacBook 14 I really don’t see the incentive to upgrade right now
3-5 years minimum but one thing is sure I’m staying with Apple macbook pros…just so amazing
Has anyone even saturated rose bandwidth numbers on their system?
At this point im about to buy a refurbished M2 pro, instead of the M3
A SOC with high data bandwidth, being necessary to supply porn to nerds, the right of the people to keep and bear phat data pipes, shall not be infringed.
Curious what financial benefit is there to making it have 25% less memory bandwidth?
Is it to drive consumers to a more expensive product?
I get they have 25% less bandwidth. But why?
Cost. You get more bandwidth by having more interconnect which takes up die space which means you get fewer per wafer and lower your yield. TSMCs N3 process is very expensive and is rumored to be dealing with yield issues as well.
Consumers aren’t going to spend more money for memory bandwidth. Nobody cares; the target market for the Pro is not people who want every last 1% of performance.
The 25% less bandwidth is related to the 25% fewer performance core count (8 to 6), in favor of efficiency cores (4 to 6).
Odds are Apple looked at real world usage of the Pro chips and found that performance cores were rarely fully utilized while efficiency cores were, so it made sense to shift the design. And with fewer performance cores, you need less memory bandwidths
This whole thread is full of poeple who couldn’t even explain why memory bandwidth is important (hint: doubling bandwidth will haze zero impact on performance unless it was the bottleneck).
Especially when you consider that the average DDR5 in PCs runs about 70GB/s, Apple has heavily over provisioned bandwidth for the CPU anyway.
I’d be interested in seeing if their new GPU is constrained by memory bandwidth though.
All I want is a 64gb 14” M3 and I have to get the Max for that. So no issues here but the 3k hole in my wallet with trade in.
Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?
From Apple’s slides starting at 10:29:
M3 = 35% faster CPU than M1; 20% faster than M2
M3 Pro = 20% faster CPU than M1 Pro; No comparison to M2 Pro was given! 🤔
M3 Max = 80% faster than M1 Max; 50% faster than M2 Max
When Apple announced the M2 Pro they claimed it was 20% faster than M1 Pro. So are we to assume M3 Pro has no performance improvement this gen?
They’ve reduced the number of performance cores from eight to six, and as per the OP memory bandwidth at 150GB/sec is lower than the 200GB/sec of the M1 Pro.
It seems reducing the number of performance cores in favour of efficiency cores has eliminated any performance uplift M3 Pro had over M2 Pro.
Clearly they’re trying to cut costs to bring it closer to the new M3 Base MBP (also happens to be closer in performance too). They’re trying to upsell people to the Pro (it’s a little cheaper than the M2 Pro was).
As a sidenote this is also why the pricing for the M3 Base makes exactly 0 sense (adding the 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD that should have been standard for £1700 makes it the same price as the Pro where I live).
Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?
Maybe upon further testing they’ve noticed he bandwidth is never going to be utilized with base M1/M2 specs, hence they were able to lower it without impacting end-user experience. So lowering production cost without any impact. But that’s a big maybe.
A fast flowing data stream , being necessary to the porn for nerds, the right of the people to keep and bear 200 gbps bandwidth chip, shall not be infringed.
Well the biggest update seems to be finally having modern GPU features, that is DirextX 12 Ultimate features. They had to make room somewhere for that hardware. Too bad they didn’t give any actual benchmarks for the new shaders or raytracing acceleration performance.
But it doesnt support DX12 or Vulkan, so the GPU performance is near useless for gaming, as very very few games run natively on Mac.
Modern GPU features such as lacking AV1 encoding at the tail end of 2023
I just want them to “innovate” their way into supporting an actual number of monitors that makes sense.
They do it to „upsell“ you towards M3 Pro. There is no other reason why a powerful chip like M3 should not support 2, 3 or even 4 external displays.
Its a hardware limitation, so you are essentially claiming that Apple, at the design phase, explicitly scoped a limitation of external displays?
Whilst this is definitely true, wouldn’t the absence of necessary I/O hardware also cut costs on the chip?
Yes, they can cut costs on the chip and the I/O hardware if I remember correctly. Anyways, these costs are minimal compared to the enormous overall prices of these machines. It just seems like a silly idea to cut costs in an area where even 500$ Windows laptops offer a good functionality.
It’s also because the base M1/2/3 chips find their way to the iPad lineup as well, where there’s already limited use for even 1 external display.
Facts
(There’s actually a good technical reason as to why this is the case, to an extent, but the answer ultimately comes down to the fact Apple is being cheap)
What’s the technical rationale? Is it related to heat and efficiency?
The video ram would be the issue with the 8gb ram version I bet.
Only Apple has the courage to sell you a “Pro” laptop for $1600 that doesn’t support more than one external display!
Not everyone uses 2+ monitors, and then you would be demanding 4/8K at 120hz. These chips require making trade-offs.
My personal laptop is used stand-alone, for work I’m a caveman with a single monitor. If you need multiple monitors, then don’t buy the base MBP.
Even Intel’s cheapest CPUs have IGPs that support 3 external monitors at 4k, you just need to make sure it has the ports to do it (like 1x thunderbolt 4 + 1x HDMI or Display port).
Like you can get <$500 PC laptops that do 3 external displays. Apple has no excuse beyond segmentation, forcing people to buy a more expensive ‘Pro’ CPU.
I understand why apple has to do these yearly releases, quarterly profits and reports. But wouldn’t it make more sense to have a longer research and development time to make actual leaps in productivity then do these minor steps forwards/backwards?
I’m just glad that I don’t upgrade yearly like some people seem to.
That’s not how this works. The vast majority of people upgrading computers have laptops that are generations behind. The only people who upgrade laptops yearly are people who are fucking insanely crazy/tech reviewers. Every year a new set of people are in need for an upgraded computer along with people just getting into the Apple ecosystem.
Look at what happened with the iMac. They waited 900 days and people were up in arms.
They should just always make the best laptop they can. Then whenever you go to buy one, it’ll be the best they can make. Why artificially wait. They can give say 10-15% a year or 50% every 3 years. It’s actually the same except for it levels out demand and means you can buy whenever and know you’re getting something good
There are a lot of companies that don’t need to push something new every 3-18 months, but investors ultimately call the shots and demand shiny new things that can be marketed as the bleeding edge and sold at exorbitant prices lest they sell their shares and invest it elsewhere. This is because if you’re not using your capital to create more capital, your competitors are and will outcompete you, incentivizing heavy pushes for ever-growing profit margins, stock buybacks, dividends, etc even at the expense of the products or companies involved.
Realistically an M1 will serve you perfectly well for upwards of 10 years so long as software continues to support the ARM architecture it runs on, but if Tim Cook stood on a stage and went “Look, we really tried, but the M1 is just too good and we can’t iterate on it. Just keep buying those M1 Airs until we come up with another generational leap,” he’d be dragged offstage and replaced with some MBA promising infinite growth to the investors before he finished the second sentence.
I think TSMC’s 3nm has been a dud. Yields are lower, which constrains available chips and forces Apple to use more ‘binned” chips where something is wrong (GPU core doesn’t work right, memory bus is not fully functioning, etc) and also accept some chips that need higher power to stay stable.
This leads to a weak generational leap and the odd proliferation of chip configs/chip options.
To be honest, I fail to see any major performance differences between M2 Air and M1 Air.
Not to say they’re not there, but rather the M series of CPUs are already very well optimized for typical day-to-day activities.
i guess we are back to comparing COREZ AND MEGAHURTZ lol. people who take this shit at face value or “cost savings” are uninformed and doing themselves a disservice. apple is notorious for that but it isn’t always that.
Apple … what are you doing? We are tolerating your upselliing pricing models since years, but now you really drive off the highway. Mother Earth M3.