Apple releases M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max chips

Apple’s “fast” press conference today, Apple officially released the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, which are the first PC chip with 3 nanotechnology technology.

According to the official, the new generation of graphics processors equipped with M3 series chips has achieved the largest leap in the history of graphics architecture in Apple chips. This graphics processor is not only faster and more energy efficient, but also introduces a new technology – dynamic caching, and brings new rendering functions such as hardware accelerated ray tracing and grid shading for the first time on Mac. The rendering speed can be up to 2.5 times faster than M1 series chips. The high-performance core and energy-efficient cores carried by the CPU are 30% and 50% faster than the corresponding cores in M1, respectively, and the neural network engine is 60% faster than that on M1 series chips.

M3 is equipped with 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24GB unified memory, up to 20% faster than M2; M3 Pro is equipped with 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, 36GB unified memory, up to M2 Pro 10% increase; M3 Max is equipped with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB unified memory, and up to 20% faster than M2 Max.

According to Apple, the new generation of graphics processors in the M3 series chips has achieved the largest leap in graphics architecture in the history of Apple chips. Unlike traditional graphics processors, it has a dynamic cache function, so it can allocate the use of local memory in hardware in real time. With the support of dynamic caching function, the memory consumption of each task accurately meets the needs. This industry-first technology is transparent to developers and provides the cornerstone for building a new graphics processor architecture. It greatly improves the average utilization of graphics processors, thus significantly improving the performance of more demanding professional apps and games.

With the support of M3 series chips, the hardware acceleration ray tracing function landed on the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing technology can simulate the performance of light in the scene, thus helping apps create lifelike and realistic pictures. With the addition of this function and the new graphics processor architecture, professional apps can run up to 2.5 times faster than M1 series chips. In addition, the new graphics processor also brings hardware-accelerated grid coloring function to Mac, realizing the double improvement of graphics processing ability and energy efficiency, and supporting games and apps with higher graphics processing requirements to present more complex visual effects. According to the official, the M3 graphics processor can achieve the same performance as M1 when the power consumption is halved, and the performance can be improved by up to 65% at peak power consumption.

All chips in the M3 family are equipped with the iconic unified memory architecture of Apple chips. This brings high bandwidth, low latency, and unparaled energy efficiency. In addition, the M3 chip supports up to 128GB of memory capacity, which makes it possible for workflows that could not be processed on laptops in the past. For example, AI developers can now run larger Transformer models with billions of parameters.

M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips also introduce an enhanced neural network engine to accelerate powerful machine learning (ML) models. Compared with M1 series chips, the new neural network engine brings up to 60% faster. While further accelerating the AI/ML workflow, it can also keep data on the device to protect user privacy.

We noted that M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max also support a variety of codecs, such as H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW and AV1.