Last night was the Scary Fast, an Apple event that surprised us all. In it, the company unveiled its new processors and new computers, both laptops and desktops. Now, it’s time to talk about the M3 Pro, the star SoC of this year.
The new Apple M3 Pro is mass-produced using the latest 3nm technology, giving the chipset incredible performance per watt attributes while consuming less energy than competing chipsets.
However, despite these improvements, we have observed in the specification comparison with the M2 Pro that Apple has reduced certain features in some aspects, especially in the number of performance cores and memory bandwidth.
Fewer cores and less bandwidth in the M3 Pro: What happened?
A variant of the M2 Pro with a 12-core CPU and a 19-core GPU offers better specifications than the M3 Pro, at least on paper. On one hand, the latest chipset features an 18-core GPU, one core less than the M2 Pro, but that’s not all that has been downgraded.
Apple may have maintained the number of CPU cores in both chipsets, but their configuration has been slightly altered. While the M2 Pro has eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, the M3 Pro actually has fewer performance cores, with six of them, along with six efficiency cores.
This reduction in performance cores could be one of the reasons why, during the Apple event, the marketing slides only showed a 10% difference between the M2 Pro and the M3 Pro.
It’s possible that Apple intentionally lowered the performance budget of the latest SoC to offer more in terms of battery life, although we’ll have to wait for more tests to provide a more definitive answer. We have also noticed that the memory bandwidth of the M3 Pro is 25% lower than that of the M2 Pro.
The previous specification comparison reveals that the M3 Pro has a memory bandwidth of 150GB/s, whereas the M2 Pro has a memory bandwidth of 200GB/s.
How much this reduction influences real-world usage will be determined once official performance tests arrive. If Apple has deliberately reduced the capabilities of its latest SoC, it could be to improve the battery life of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to confirm it, so we’ll have to wait for the tests to surface, and as always, we will keep you informed.
