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?
It better to say the put effort into bespoke designing it rather than just taking part of the Max chips design… why did they put this effort in? I expect the reason is yields are lower on 3nm and cost per mm2 is much higher… You can see from the die shots how everything is packed much tighter on the M3 Pro compared to the M2 pro (this takes a lot of work to do and still have the internal frabic within the chip). Apple clearly wanted to shink the die size down otherwise they would have had to increase the prices of Macs with the M3 Pro.