On: M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores

[mcphage]

> I think you set your expectations too high.

Well, they did announce it in an event called "scary fast". I mean there's always marketing exaggeration, but I did expect more than trying to understand if it's even faster at all. Otherwise I'm not entirely certain what the point was.

[whynotminot → mcphage]

Literally the only point of confusion here is M3 Pro versus M2 Pro, where Apple seems to have simply made different choices around what the Pro chip should be.

M3 Max is a massive gain over M2 Max. And M3 is a nice improvement over M2.

Hope that helps.

[mcphage → whynotminot]

That does, actually. Thanks.

[runjake → mcphage]

  > Well, they did announce it in an event called "scary fast".

It was the night before Halloween.

  > I mean there's always marketing exaggeration

Apple's marketing people are notorious for exaggeration.

  > I did expect more than trying to understand if it's even faster at all

Their stated performance improvements seem to be accurate. Although I'm surprised at how much faster the M3 Max seems to be.

  > I'm not entirely certain what the point was.

The point was this year's revisions with a speed bump. They do this almost every year.

That said, early benchmarks are indicating that the M3 Max performance is on par with the M2 Ultra. I consider that “scary fast” myself.

[stetrain → mcphage]

It felt like half the event was listing different types of workload and saying that the new chips were 15-20% faster than the M2 generation at that task, and 30-40% faster than the M1 generation.

The only real exception to that is the M3 Pro, which is closer to the performance of the M2 Pro at a reduced core count.