Apple’s M3 chips are made on 3nm and have improved GPU with ray tracing
Apple has introduced its Apple Silicon M3 chips for Macs. These are produced on TSMC’s 3nm process and have, among other things, an improved GPU architecture. The chips will be available in the MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ and the iMac 24″.
Apple comes with an M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max, all three of which are based on the same 3nm process. It is the first time that Apple has introduced Mac chips based on TSMC’s N3 node. The company previously released the A17 Pro SoC for iPhones, which TSMC produces using the same process.
The newer N3 process allows, among other things, a larger number of transistors, Apple says. The ‘normal’ M3, for example, has 25 billion transistors; that is 5 billion more than in the M2. The M3 Pro will have 37 billion transistors, surprisingly fewer than the M2 Pro, which had 40 billion. The M3 Max has a ‘maximum’ of 92 billion, while the M2 Max had 67 billion transistors.
The Apple Silicon M3 series. Source: Apple
When introducing the M3 series, Apple focuses mainly on the GPU, which according to the company is faster and more efficient than before. The GPU offers, among other things, hardware acceleration for ray tracing and mesh shading, both of which should benefit gaming performance. Apple also talks about a new Dynamic Caching technique, which should allocate the use of local memory in real time, so that the GPU only uses the necessary memory and no more. According to Apple, the GPU can be used more efficiently in this way.
The ‘regular’ M3 still has a maximum of ten GPU cores and, according to the manufacturer, is up to 65 percent faster than the GPU in the M1. The M3 Pro has a maximum of eighteen GPU cores. Remarkably, this is one less than the previous M2 Pro, which had a maximum of nineteen GPU cores. Apple says the M3 Pro GPU performs up to forty percent better than that in the M1 Pro. The M3 Max comes with up to forty GPU cores, two more than the maximum of the M2 Max. Apple talks about an eighty percent performance improvement compared to the M1 Max. The tech giant does not publish GPU comparisons with the M2 Pro and M2 Max, which were released earlier this year.
Apple M3 Max with 128GB memory.
Source: Apple
Apple also claims that the CPU has also been improved. The tech giant cites improvements in the architecture of both the performance and efficiency cores. The performance cores should be up to thirty percent faster than those in the M1 and fifteen percent faster than those in the M2. The improvements to the M3 efficiency cores are said to be up to fifty percent over those in the M1 and up to thirty percent compared to the M2.
The Neural Engine in the M3 chips has also been improved; According to the manufacturer, this is up to sixty percent faster than that in the M1 series and up to fifteen percent faster than the Neural Engine of the M2. The Media Engine has also been improved and this time supports AV1 decoding. The M3 Max further supports up to 128GB of memory.
With the switch to a 3nm process, Apple promises further efficiency. The M3 should offer the same multithreaded performance as the 2020 M1 at half the power consumption. This also gives the new MacBook Pro a battery life of up to 22 hours. The company compares the M3 performance with that of Intel’s Core i7-1360P laptop processor, which has sixteen CPU threads and an Iris Xe GPU. The M3 would deliver approximately the same CPU performance at a quarter of the power consumption. With the GPU that would be one fifth of the power consumption.
The M3 series will be available in the first products in November. Apple introduced new MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ models on Tuesday night, in addition to an iMac 24″ with M3 socket.