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 overall performance uplift M3 Pro had over M2 Pro. We’ll have to wait for benchmarks to be certain, but I’m sure Apple’s omission of a comparison to M2 Pro is very telling.
These things already had incredible battery life, I’m not sure why Apple would choose to sacrifice performance for more battery life? The people buying these machines, myself included, are pros that need performance, and the rest of the M3 family has CPU performance improvements, so why not M3 Pro?
I think Apple has already hit general adoption for speed but I think they are working on 2 key aspects that were not ready for the M1/2.
I think the M3 is their next iteration to tackle the above which is why it was at a throw away conference the day before Halloween. It’s not meant to be a generational shift, its iterative.
People like long battery life (a staple of Apple Macs) so its an easy sales feature while they focus on some more core functionality in future chips. Nothing wrong with the approach, also why I assume this is non-pro ATM, the IO/PCI lanes.
Just my speculation tho.