At tonight’s “Scary Fast” online event, Apple has unveiled its M3 family of chips. Coming less than five months after Apple unveiled its most recent M2 chip,
“It features Dynamic Caching that, unlike traditional GPUs, allocates the use of local memory in hardware in real time. With Dynamic Caching, only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. This is an industry first, transparent to developers, and the cornerstone of the new GPU architecture. It dramatically increases the average utilization of the GPU, which significantly increases performance for the most demanding pro apps and games,” Apple says.
As for CPU cores, the performance cores are up to 30% faster than the M1 and 15% faster than the M2. Efficiency is up to 50% faster than the M1 and 30% faster than the M2. Apple says its new chips maintain the company’s industry-leading “performance per watt” claim. The company also has not hesitated to tout its performance relative to leading Windows computers, claiming that the M3 delivers the same graphics performance with a quarter of the power.
However, that is not to say there’s nothing interesting with the base M3 chip. The move from five-nanometer to three-nanometer technology promises improved energy efficiency, reducing operating costs for a desktop like the iMac and better battery life for notebooks. The M3 has up to 24GB of integrated memory.That said, looking instead at the M3 Pro shows that Apple is not withholding performance gains with its M3 family of chips.