Apple at its Scary fast event today introduced the Me, M3 Pro, and the M3 Max chipset. These newly announced chips are built using a 3-nanometer process and they arrive as a successor to the M2 series chipset. Apple claims that the newly introduced M3 family of chips consist of a next-generation GPU that represents the biggest leap forward in graphics architecture ever for Apple silicon. The GPU is faster and more efficient as well as it includes a new technology called Dynamic Caching. The new chipset also brings features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading to Mac for the first time.
Apple M3 Chipset Family Details
The rendering speed of the new M3 family is now up to 2.5x faster than on the M1 family chips. Compared to the M1 chipset, the CPU performance cores and efficiency cores are 30 percent and 50 percent faster in the M3 chipset respectively. Additionally, the Neural Engine is 60 percent faster than the M1 chip. As mentioned above, the chipset uses a new technology called Dynamic Caching. With this new technology, only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. Apple claims that this is an industry-first technology transparent to developers, and the cornerstone of the new GPU architecture. Ray tracing along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips.
The M3 chipset family supports up to 128GB of fast LPDDR5 unified memory. The new chip also provides hardware acceleration to the most popular video codecs, including H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW. Let us take a look at each of the newly introduced M3 chipsets in detail ahead:
Apple M3 Chip
The Apple M3 chip consists of 25 billion transistors — 5 billion more than M2. This new chip has a 10-core GPU which is 65 percent faster than the M1 for graphic performance. Furthermore, the chip has an 8-core CPU which consists of four performance cores and four efficiency cores. Apple claims that the CPU performance on the M3 is 35 percent faster than that of the M1. Additionally, the new chip supports 24GB of unified memory.
Apple M3 Pro
The newly introduced M3 Pro features 37 billion transistors and an 18-core GPU which offers extremely fast performance when working on more graphics-intensive tasks. The new GPU is 40 percent faster than that of the M1 Pro. Additionally, the new chip also supports up to 36GB of unified memory which enables larger projects to be tackled on the go. The chip consists of a 12-core CPU. Out of 12-core, six are performance cores and the other six are efficiency cores. Compared to the M1 Pro, the new M3 Pro CPU has a 30 percent faster single-threaded performance.
Apple M3 Max
The Apple M3 Max consists of up to 92 billion transistors. The new chip includes 40-core GPU which is 50 percent faster than the M1 Max. It also has support for 128GB of unified memory. The chip features a 16-core CPU out of which 12 are performance cores and four are efficiency cores. This combination offers 80 percent faster performance than M1 Max. It also has two ProRes engines which make video post-production work on even the highest-resolution content.
The newly announced M3, M3 Pro, and the M3 Max chipset powers the MacBook Pro and the new iMac which is introduced today. You can learn more details about the newly announced MacBook Pro with M3 processor here.
