What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/11/22/what-has-changed-in-cpu-cores-in-m3-chips/

by zdw • 3 years ago

211 305 3 years ago

stevage• 3 years ago

If you already have an Apple silicon Mac and are wondering whether to upgrade to an M3 model

I see comments like this in various reviews. Are there really people out there who would replace a Macbook Pro M1 or M2 with a M3 just to get something a bit faster? What are they doing that is so performance critical?

My last Macbook Pro is a 2014. I still find it usable for development work, and I'm only replacing it because of other hardware failures.

perfopt• 3 years ago

I am still rocking a 2012 MBP. I even have a PPC MacMini but it now runs Linux. I have no idea who is upgrading from a M1/M2 to M3 or why they would

shawnc• 3 years ago

I work with a lot of 4K elements and video in Apple Motion, After Effects, and other applications. The better the chip the faster things go, especially previews and encoding. Every second ends up counting.

I can see why others like me may upgrade. But I’m not going to bother just yet.

youcantcook• 3 years ago

Funny how "genius" people on a "genius" forum can't fathom how people do other things than write text in a text editor.

JCharante3• 3 years ago

the battery life is really good

inferiorhuman4• 3 years ago

Over the years I've gone through a Core2 MacBook, a 2011 MBP, a 2015 MBP, and now a 14" 2023 M2 Pro as each wore out physically over the years. Generally the charging systems and keyboards degraded severely by the 5 year mark. The 2015 had all those problems as well as janky graphics issues, but I used it until its SSD died recently.

Aside from performance it's hard to overstate just how quiet the current MacBook Pro is. The 2015 got noisy pretty easily especially if I had to switch to the discrete GPU, and anything heavier than 1080p30 in Firefox would cause the fans to go bonkers. By most accounts the last of the Intel models were worse. This one? After a few hours of transcoding video the fans still only spin up to a quiet whisper.

What I don't hear anyone talk about is the rigidity. You could hear the 2015 creak and flex if you picked it up with one hand. The 2023 just feels like a solid chunk of metal.

For all of its warts, this is probably my favorite hardware of the bunch. The software (macos 14) is utter garbage though. That's the culmination of lots of poor design choices over the years and nearly non-existent quality control.

zaphod420• 3 years ago

I upgraded from an M1 pro to an M3 max. it's a nice upgrade.

muro3• 3 years ago

I'd like to do the same. I want to upgrade to 4TB SSD, as I'm at the limit all the time and I spend a lot of time moving data from the laptop to NAS and back. With the upgrade, I'll get a M3 max for the peace of mind - it will be ridiculously expensive anyway.

LeSaucy• 3 years ago

I just switched from 16" 2019 i9 -> 16" M3 pro and 2 weeks later still stunned at how amazing of a machine it is. I do a lot of c++ dev for $dayjob and my current project which took 1m45s to full rebuild on i9 is down to ~25s on m3. Without a fan turning on or barely getting warm. Its _magical_. I still get caught off guard by the chassis being cold when first placed on my lap.

esskay• 3 years ago

Pro no, Air however yep, I'm one of them. Big performance boost from the base M1 to the M3 Pro.

thelittleone2• 3 years ago

Me too. I get every second generation. Air is so cheap, why not. The business apps I run used to require a Macbook Pro to run. Now the 13" air does it beautifully, and with amazing portability. I often have to carry 2 laptops when traveling. So before with an MBP 16" and 2nd laptop, it was damn heavy.

smcleod2• 3 years ago

M1 to M2 Pro for the 96GB which is nice for LLMs/AI.

baq• 3 years ago

Or you could buy a car...?

Apple RAM premium is outrageous.

culi3• 3 years ago

Why not wait for M4?

Amorymeltzer• 3 years ago

Depends on your workload and what you're doing. This is an extreme example, but Marco Arment over on ATP discussed going from a top-o-the-line M1 to top-o-the-line M3, and saw his Xcode build time for his app (Overcast) get nearly cut in half (I believe he said 19 seconds to 11 seconds). For something that happens several times a day and is a critical and interruptive step in his workflow, yeah, he found it meaningful.

pg52• 3 years ago

I make music mostly for fun and my m1 is barely keeping up with Logic Pro and the plugins I'm running, which are amp sims, various typical mixing plugins, and virtual drums. I'm not even using a crazy number of tracks at any given moment.

mnw21cam• 3 years ago

Given that a 7MHz Amiga 500 could mix eight tracks in CPU in real time, this is a very sad state of affairs. Your M1 is how many thousand times faster?

gessha• 3 years ago

Did you have an Intel Mac before? If so, did you have the same workflow with the same amount of plugins or did you expand your usage based on the laptop capabilities? Just curious about “workflow creep” because I’m wondering if I should get an M[1..9].

TheCleric• 3 years ago

My rule for Logic Pro is that it will expand to make any computer you run it on "just barely keep up".

firecall2• 3 years ago

Xcode and SwiftUI is one answer.

I’m tempted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M3 Max.

Reports suggest id halve my build times and then some.

culi3• 3 years ago

... how long are your build times? If your build times are high enough to really affect your productivity, I feel like there are much cheaper (and environmentally friendly) ways to halve them

nivertech• 3 years ago

How much RAM do you need for fast Xcode + Swift UI development?

bhouston2• 3 years ago

Geekbench for an M1 Pro multi-core is 11643, while the M3 Max (16 core) has a pref of: 21387. That would be a major upgrade so yeah, it is probably worth it of you can afford it.

All stats from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj...

righthand• 3 years ago

They’re not doing anything critical, the people who upgrade for that minor bump are the fanatics who upgrade their cellphone every year for a minor megapixel bump. It’s fashion tech to the benefit of non-work related needs.

scarface_748• 3 years ago

Yes because people couldn’t possible have workloads that benefit from a 30% speed up or have bill rates that justify it.

treprinum2• 3 years ago

The option to have 128GB RAM for stable diffusion and local LLMs.

moondev2• 3 years ago

Since 8GB unified memory is "equivalent to a 16GB non Mac" Is 128GB unified memory MacBook basically a 256GB Nvidia GPU(s)?

csydas• 3 years ago

it’s not my thing but there are certainly tech enthusiasts and even brand specific enthusiasts that like details like this as they do try to get “the best” from their tech.

so probably it’s not for everyone but i guess there is value in knowing how big of a bump the newest model gives.

nordsieck2• 3 years ago

Are there really people out there who would replace a Macbook Pro M1 or M2 with a M3 just to get something a bit faster?

Are there really people who buy a new car every 2 years?

Yes. Yes there are.

Some people like to have the newest stuff and don't mind living paycheck to paycheck to do so. Or maybe they're rich.

troupe4• 3 years ago

There are some people who just waste their money, but there are also a wide difference in the value people get from their cars and computers. Someone billing $500 per hour is going to be a lot more willing to upgrade their computer for even a small improvement. They may even keep a spare computer just to make sure they have minimum downtime if something goes wrong. Someone who just uses their computer to watch youtube videos may be fine keeping their computer until it stops working.

cglace3• 3 years ago

You need to be rich to afford a new computer every 3 years?

petercooper2• 3 years ago

Or maybe they work with computers in a business full time and the price of a new computer is minor compared to the income it's used to produce, especially if it's tax deductible, such that it's a valid business decision if the improvements are barely more than marginal.

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

M2, no, virtually none. The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies. A lot of corporates still _kind_ of live in the past, hearkening back to a time when a three year old laptop was largely unusable (and might well be _physically_ falling apart; general manufacture quality of this sort of thing has improved a lot in the last 20 years).

In the late noughties I worked for a smallish company where engineers got MBPs and everyone else got mid-range PC business laptops (I think Dell or someone?) The failure rate on the PC laptops was just astonishing; they were practically disposable. The failure rate of the MBPs was higher than you'd see today, though not as bad. Replacing machines in under 3 years was the norm because many of them didn't _work_ after 3 years.

Detrytus3• 3 years ago

Three years is also when AppleCare expires. That’s enough for some people/corporations to upgrade

abakker• 3 years ago

my 3 year old corporate HP feels like its been at end of life since the windows 11 upgrade. The 2 year old M1Max MBP feels indestructible and still has hilariously long battery life and crushes basically everything I ask of it.

JCharante3• 3 years ago

The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies.

Yup. It's hmm should I upgrade now or wait next year for a juicy M4 model? (some corporate refresh policies let you buy your old work computer at a heavily reduced price, giving you an incentive to get a good work computer)

deskamess4• 3 years ago

The earliest M1s are three years old now, so may be up for replacement under some corporate refresh policies

If anyone knows where I can be downstream of these M1's (website, other old stock websites) please let me know. I would like to procure 1 or 2 on the cheap. Esp an M1 Pro.

Swizec• 3 years ago

A lot of corporates still _kind_ of live in the past, hearkening back to a time when a three year old laptop was largely unusable

With the amount of nannyware and spyware these corporations load up on your laptop it actually does feel pretty unusable. The difference in performance between my personal 4 year old laptop and my corporate 3 year old laptop is ridiculous.

The corporate laptop has so many antiviruses and stuff running all the time that it feels like a 2000’s era windows machine that’s been exposed to the internet for too long.

theyeenzbeanz• 3 years ago

My current jobsite still uses vista era laptops with 4GB of memory, a battery that dies within minutes if not plugged in, and a painfully slow spindle drive. A 3 year old computer would be a luxury here.

caycep• 3 years ago

My M1 Pro still feels super fast...

the corporate thing reminds me of my professor back in college - they'd upgrade him to the latest/greatest Power Mac each year, only for him to boot it up and terminal into his VMS machine and launch min...

dylan6042• 3 years ago

Don't forget that corps also have financial reasons for constant upgrades. Buying new hardware is a great way to reduce taxable profits. There's also the amortization on write offs, and other accounting words I've heard people say but don't pretend to fully grok.

Also, decent way to lessen the beatings to improve moral since who doesn't like getting new hardware?

MBCook• 3 years ago

That’s a fantastic point, but I can also think of two more.

Let’s say you were thinking of an M2 but knew this was coming. The difference between the M3 and M2 may tell you it’s worth getting the newer M3 or the (now cheaper) M2.

Or perhaps you saw the M2 wasn’t a big leap. You want to replace your older laptop but didn’t want to get an M2 because it wasn’t a big leap over the M1 in many respects. This info would tell you if it was a big leap (buy now!) or you might as well hold off another year if you can.

The other reason is simply making it interesting. If every article was comparing to a 5-6 year old laptop, the answer would almost always be “it’s amazing!” Even if that’s what most people come from it’s a boring story. But year to year variation is much higher.

wil421• 3 years ago

My wife “stole” my M1 Air. At the time, it was good to see a comparison between the M1/M2. I order custom spec ones but for someone who doesn’t they may want to buy a generation old to save me.

However, I agree on the phrasing. The amount of people who are upgrading yearly is much smaller than people who would buy a generation older Mac to save money.

Retr0id2• 3 years ago

The M1/M2/M3 base models all have only 8GB of RAM. Someone who cheaped out on a first-gen model to test the waters (even if they didn't necessarily go for 8GB) might now be looking to upgrade, and if they're buying used then all three CPU generations are worth considering.

JanSt• 3 years ago

This is me

jghn• 3 years ago

I have an 8GB M1 Air for the sole reason that I was so excited I decided to go with the model I could get on release day instead of waiting a month. Not the wisest decision.

I figured I'd replace it at M2, and then at M3. But to be honest even with the 8GB it's fine enough still. I don't use it for much heavy lifting but it works ok-ish for that in a pinch. And for day to day personal use it's fine. So every year I go through the cycle where I *want* to replace it and then convince myself I don't really need it. I already have a monster machine for my work stuff, having extra horsepower for my personal machine would be nice but ....

I'm sure M4 is the generation I'll upgrade. Just wait :)

goosedragons• 3 years ago

Apple also still sells everything but the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra brand new in various devices too.

kzrdude• 3 years ago

Used market is full of those 8 GB models

a_vanderbilt• 3 years ago

This is what happened in my case. I had an 8GB Air and while the CPU performance was incredible, it lacked the RAM to fully take advantage of it. I upgraded to a 16GB M2 Mac Mini. I consider it to be the perfect UNIX machine for my use case. If I need to access it on the go I remote in from a cheapo laptop.

jonpurdy• 3 years ago

I replaced a 16GB Intel MacBook Pro with an 8GB refurb M1 Air and regretted it within weeks. (Due to the initial claims about M1 using less memory and that the M1 destroyed my Intel's Javascript performance.)

Turns out that my 8GB machine would slow down significantly when hitting the RAM limit. This was expecially noticeable when running Final Cut Pro (almost unusable) or Photo Mechanic + Photoshop (I'd have to quit one to run the other). I tolerated this situation until the M2 Airs came out and I maxed it to 24GB RAM, and have been beyond happy with it since then!

My partner now has my 8GB M1 and it works perfectly for her.

cglace3• 3 years ago

I replaced my M1 macbook pro because with 16 GB of ram I was constantly swapping.

nottorp3• 3 years ago

Most average HNers should get 32 or 64 Gb. You can use a 16 Gb machine but you'll be limited.

I bought a M2 Mac Mini with 16 Gb to test the platform. There's a Studio with 64 Gb in my future ;)

pjmlp• 3 years ago

Yes, people with too much money to spare like a couple of Mac podcasters.

antigirl2• 3 years ago

Not everyones a developer. M1 vs M3 performance boost for video editing seems like a decent upgrade. I'm still on M1 and I spent £4k+ on specced up MBP 14 inch. Its not struggling but it doesn't perform well when editing 4k with one layer of effects in DaVinci.

mikece3• 3 years ago

I was wondering about the improvement for photo and video editing, but that would be more of a function of the GPU than the CPU, wouldn't it? I certainly need more than 8GB of RAM for photo editing... memory pressure slows down Photoshop and Lightroom.

baz002• 3 years ago

I was going to change my M1 for an M3 because I like the black one :)

have_faith• 3 years ago

Chaotic Neutral

JCharante3• 3 years ago

mkbhd's review is that the m3 isn't black enough to be considered black.

browningstreet• 3 years ago

It’s contextualizatipn positioning. And a few.

Marques Brownlee has been rocking an M1 Pro laptop and ordered an M3. Which he cancelled after he got his review unit. He’s got enough money to not think hard about it but he cancelled anyway. Which stands as an interesting data point.

bhouston2• 3 years ago

I upgraded from a MacMini M1 (Geekbench multicore pref: 8425) to an MacMini M2 Pro with 12 cores (Geekbench multicore pref: 14431.) That was definitely worth it.

The only upgrade for the M3 line I would make would be to an M3 Max 16 core (Geekbench multicore pref: 21387) or an upcoming M3 Ultra 32 core (probably a Geekbench multicore pref: ~30000), but it is very expensive and probably not available in the MacMini form factor, so I will hold off for now.

All stats from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5dBe_rsiNaQATH-D-Pj...

smcl• 3 years ago

I know the whole "carbon footprint" thing was designed to allow big companies and governments to pretend that 7 billion people need to individually decide to change their lifestyles, to fully understand the environmental implications of the various consumer choices they make and assumes that environmentally-friendly options are already available in all cases ...

But the carbon footprint of some people I see here must be astronomical.

eric__cartman• 3 years ago

I at least hope they sell/give away those machines to keep them in circulation. I'd be a real shame to have modern and environmentally expensive hardware like that be torn apart for scrap metal in a recycling facility. Many tech companies love the "eco-friendly" trade in programs that essentially serve to take working, used devices out of circulation.

2143• 3 years ago

For my personal machine I have a relatively new ThinkPad running linux that works perfectly well for everything that I do.

Ever since it came out I want to buy a MacBook with these new chips as my personal machine. But I haven't yet bought one because I don't need one.

Or I'll buy it when my ThinkPad dies. (Weird laughter).

And then over here I read about people replacing laptops every other year or so, and I wonder why I am the way I am.

astrange3• 3 years ago

It's mostly governments that need to change because they control land use policy. This is up to individual decisions of those 7 billion people though, because that's how voting works.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

An environmentalist friend told me that my use of Terrapass is pointless and that there's no point attempting to reduce my footprint because big companies are the cause of it. So I stopped worrying about both things. This is fortunate because I've increased the amount of flying I do these days. Usually, environmentalists get in the way of things, so I was quite pleased that here was this positive development.

nocoiner• 3 years ago

I did something fairly out of character for myself and replaced a six-month-old M2 MBP with a brand new MBP with an M3 Max. I attribute it to three factors:

1. I went with 16 GB of RAM on the M2 and sort of regretted it from day one. I have 36 GB on the M3 and feel much more comfortable about that in a machine I plan to use for the next 5-7 years.

2. Apple gave me what I thought was a very generous trade-in offer on the M2 - something like 90% of what I paid for it, even after half a year’s use. At that value, it basically felt like a wash going from the old computer to a new one, and I was just paying for the substantial upgrade on the old machine (Max-level processor, bigger SSD, quite a bit more memory).

3. I thought the darker color looked neat. That said, it’s much subtler than I imagined, and I wouldn’t have considered this as a factor.

Of course, the truly hilarious thing is that I don’t do anything at all intensive on my computer so I’d be just fine with just about anything. But what can I say, I like to know I could if I wanted to.

binkHN• 3 years ago

1. I went with 16 GB of RAM on the M2 and sort of regretted it from day one. I have 36 GB on the M3 and feel much more comfortable about that in a machine I plan to use for the next 5-7 years.

Very fair; part of the reason I went with 64GB on my ThinkPad, and Apple makes this configuration almost cost prohibitive.

james33• 3 years ago

Game engines can be pretty hefty (especially the big 3D ones like Unity or Unreal), you can always find benefit from faster CPU/GPU/RAM with this type of dev work. This is the only reason I'm tempted to upgrade my M1 Max.

rickette• 3 years ago

Yeah, most M-series are plenty fast I think. Just upgraded from a 2018 Intel Macbook to the M3 Max and the change is very noticeable. Hope and plan to keep using this machine again for 5+ years or so.

petercooper2• 3 years ago

Different strokes for different folks, but I have a higher bar than "usable" for tools that my income relies upon. A moderate improvement in experience (whether performance, screen, storage speed, or merely that a key on the keyboard no longer "feels weird") warrants frequent upgrades of my main machine, yes.

anovikov• 3 years ago

Compilation speed difference between 2015 15" mbp and M1 Pro 14" was truly profound. I could compile in a time it takes to make and drink a coffee what previously took half night.

swalsh• 3 years ago

I have a MacBook pro m1. I'm considering an upgrade, but not for CPU. What I really need is more memory. This computer is not capable of doing any real load of development work without running out of memory. It's insanely frustrating.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

Consooming <NEW PRODUCT> is critical, the performance capabilities are just a nice bonus.

Eric_WVGG• 3 years ago

I picked up a 16gb M1 Pro about as soon as they came out. It was unbelievable for the first year, basic React web stack work.

Now I'm working on a project that requires about six Docker images, and we made a questionable choice about Typescript packages for typing our API responses. The Docker consumes most of my RAM, and even when it's turned off, there's a visible different in the IDE between mine and my M2 equipped coworkers whenever a document that uses this dumb lib is opened.

So anyway I'm picking up an M3 Max next week.

grecy• 3 years ago

Selling the M1? My email is in my bio. Thanks

steve1977• 3 years ago

When you need a high end laptop for web development, what a sad state of affairs...

smolder4• 3 years ago

An alternative to leaning on your laptop that way is to use a 2nd headless system to do builds, run tests, host containers, etc. It can be more economical over time and better DX to use this [semi-] dumb terminal approach, depending on specifics of your workflow.

wkat4242• 3 years ago

If you need docker, just get a Linux laptop, it really works way better.

rowanG077• 3 years ago

6 docker instances... I didn't click on this thread to be offended.

n8cpdx2• 3 years ago

People here are jumping through hoops to justify these purchases. I don’t get it.

It is completely OK to want to have nice things in your life. It is OK to invest in yourself. It is OK to place a high value (2021 vs 2023 Mac) or any value (2014 Mac vs 2023 Mac) on your time.

Maybe the shocked reactions are a result of currency conversions, but when you factor in trade in value, the M1 to M3 upgrade isn’t much more expensive than an iPhone.

Over the course of two years, the Mac is no more expensive than a gym membership (actually quite a lot less depending on the gym) and probably gets a lot more use.

But there I go justifying again. If personal computing is your hobby or your passion, you should spend your hard-earned money on what you want.

smolder4• 3 years ago

It's not about about having "nice things" or affordability for me. I try to minimize upgrades mainly out of concern for e-waste and other externalities of manufacture, and because setting up the environment on new hardware is a time sink. Picking appropriate hardware for a use case is also part of that. I won't buy a threadripper workstation to game & watch YouTube on, for instance. It's okay to be passionate about responsible spending, too.

johnthescott• 3 years ago

imacs are mighty-fine unix workstations, ergonomically speaking. no other brand comes even close, in my opinion, although ubuntu is getting close. throw in ports/homebrew and all the gnu/linux tools i need for servers are at my fingertips. virtual machines scoop up the scraps.

ajross• 3 years ago

My last Macbook Pro is a 2014

For those curious: this is running a 3.7GHz 4-core Haswell. That's very roughly the performance that you'd get from a contemporary Alder Lake-N (the E-cores only variant). c.f. this very reasonable mid-range $450 Chromebook: https://store.acer.com/en-us/acer-chromebook-314-cb314-4ht-3...

flohofwoe• 3 years ago

Unfortunately some very useful Metal profiling/debugging tools [1] are only available on the latest hardware. Funny enough this was always the main reason for me to update, not performance (e.g. not being able to debug Metal shaders on my old Intel Mac was one important reason to finally upgrade to an M1 Mac).

Otherwise I'm still entirely happy with my 2021 minspec M1 MBP.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111374

semireg• 3 years ago

If spinning up a dev build on my M1 took 18 seconds, M2 takes 13 seconds, and an M3 takes 8 seconds... and I do this 50-100x per day, then the time saving can certainly be worth it.

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

What are they doing that is so performance critical?

Anything related to multimedia processing.

Whether it's video encoding or live audio processing or rendering or whatever.

M1 might be more than fast enough for emails and web development, but multimedia is a whole different beast.

People forget that the "Pro" refers to media professionals, not development professionals. Remember the Touch Bar? It was designed for artists and editors for things like color selection and scrubbing and sound control, not for programmers.

tjoff5• 3 years ago

And why on earth would you do that on a laptop to start with?

I'm sure apple not having decent desktops for a decade leaves a mark. I guess I'm surprised people put up with it.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

What are they doing that is so performance critical?

There are close to 100M MacBook users.

People will give you reasons here - because this is a non-representative group - but this is a tiny fraction of their user base.

The main reasons are Apple's marketing and signaling.

avidphantasm• 3 years ago

I went from an M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM to an M3 Max with 64GB. I had been regretting not getting 64GB of RAM. I plan to keep this machine at least five years, so I traded in while the trade-in value was still relatively high. I find the M3 Max to be dramatically faster. I do a lot of Python development (mostly numerical code, some micro services) and increasingly complex k8s setups. Some of my containers are still AMD64, and while these ran acceptably fast on the M1 Pro, they are MUCH faster on the M3 Max. For example, solving conda environments on a fairly complex container takes about 1/2 the time it seems (about as fast as my work 12th gen i9 Linux laptop). I am very impressed with the jump between the M3 Max and the M1 Pro, and I haven’t even touched the GPU yet.

totallywrong• 3 years ago

I have a 2015 MBP with Linux that I miss every single day while using the work M1 Pro with its crappy keyboard and short key travel. The M1 is faster but doesn't impact my work much, and I find macOS really frustrating to use.

hinkley• 3 years ago

I usually skip generations. I bought an M2 a couple months ago. Waiting for sure and largely ignoring the M3 hype. I don’t need to care, so I spend roughly half as much time consuming tech hype as I used to, and spend that extra time reading or touching grass.

lm411• 3 years ago

I used to upgrade my MacBook every year.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but I found the resale value great enough that it was almost the same cost over time to upgrade annually vs every 3-4 years. Of course if you're only upgrading every 9-10 years, the math changes significantly.

That said, due to changing priorities and needs, my current MBP is from 2018. I am planning to upgrade to an M3 MBP this week.

While my current MBP does what I need, some development processes & platforms I use nowadays are taking more time than I'd like. If it saves me 15 minutes a day, it's a great deal.

jermaustin1• 3 years ago

I just upgraded my top-spec Intel MBA from 2020 to an M3 Pro MBP.

Adjusted for inflation, the M3 was about 20% more expensive for close to infinitely more performance.

I could see holding on to this M3 Pro as my daily driver for 5-10 years assuming I don't drop it too many times.

I'll probably replace my wife's MBA from 2018 next month for whatever the bottom spec MBA is now.

KolenCh• 3 years ago

Reading your comment, my first reaction is “are there really people or there who upgrade not because they want their computer faster?”

Joke aside, for people who read reviews, I don’t think they read it because their computer is dying. So I think it is fitting from the selection bias there to focus on performance improvement. (Like when I buy a car I won’t read a review because I don’t care its performance.)

matwood2• 3 years ago

Creative workflows can often use the extra power, particularly with video.

For me, doing development and office work, I'll be hard pressed to ever replace my M1 Max w/ 64GB. I don't feel like I ever wait for anything.

devwastaken• 3 years ago

Usually the upgrade is for better webcam, screen, a fresh keyboard, maybe want more storage, etc. MacBooks hold value, so you can resell them at good prices towards the next gen.

kbf2• 3 years ago

You can configure the M3 models with twice as much RAM (128GB) as the M1 models, that’s quite an upgrade if your workflow is memory intensive. It’s especially compelling for graphics work as that memory is also used as VRAM. A desktop RTX 6000 gets you 48GB of VRAM for $6800.

pier25• 3 years ago

Depends. Someone might want to go from base M1 to M3 Pro for example.

That said I have an M2 Pro MBP and this thing is a monster.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

I have an M1 MBP that from work an a M2 MBA for my home, I don't think I'll need to upgrade for the next decade

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

I'm totally flummoxed by the graphs in the "P v E" section. Shouldn't "Total Time" remain constant-ish until the number of threads exceed the number of cores? Why does time increase linearly with the number of threads on a multi-core system? Or is "Total Time" here "CPU Time" and not wall clock time?

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

Yeah. It would make sense if he was running them serially and he sort of says that - "...show a near-perfect linear relationship, with each thread fully occupying one core for a period of 1.3 seconds". But that's not what he says elsewhere - "...so 6 threads will fully load a 6-core P cluster". It really doesn't come together, does it.

l33t7332273• 3 years ago

This is definitely the case on other processors. I’ve written a program to detect the number of cores by using that fact.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

Agreed. I don't understand it either. If running two tasks on two cores takes twice as long, then I'm better off running two tasks one after another on a single core. But if it's CPU time is the interesting result that the increased clock on the E-core when task is assigned means that assigning task to E-core doubles throughput so that two tasks spend equal CPU time as one task?

That's interesting but it wasn't clear to me.

mr_toad• 3 years ago

By “Total time” on the y axis” I assume that the time for all the threads is summed, otherwise the label “Time” would suffice.

elAhmo2• 3 years ago

Load your current Mac up with the apps you normally use together when working, and watch their use in Activity Monitor’s CPU History window. If its P cores are fully occupied much of the time, and that workload often spills over to the E cores, then you should aim for an M3 with more P cores

Author mentions we can use Activity monitor to see where are apps running, in P or E cores, but I am unable to see this. Can anyone share how to check this? Running the latest Sonoma update

pram2• 3 years ago

Window -> CPU History ⌘3

elAhmo2• 3 years ago

Thanks, I was looking at the CPU tab and thought something changed in the CPU Load in the bottom.

evulhotdog• 3 years ago

You can double click the cpu graph at the bottom of the process list, which is probably quicker than going through the menu bar.

chatmasta3• 3 years ago

Semi-related fun fact: if you open Activity Monitor with sudo from the command line, you get a lot more metrics and knobs to turn.

krackers3• 3 years ago

How exactly do you do this? When I try sudo <binary path> it immediately sigkills with a "launch constraint violation". And I tried on 10.8 from back before SIP was a thing, and didn't see any difference in terms of the per-process metrics I could sort by.

krackers3• 3 years ago

If you want to see this per-process instead of in aggregate, xcode instruments cpu counters can show you which core a thread is running on.

deskamess4• 3 years ago

I think the M1 Pro/16GB is the sweet spot for home development. I have an old Intel Air that I want to upgrade out of but the prices are still a little high. I get the feeling it will not be going much lower since any discounts should have materialized. Will keep looking at the Refurbished page on Apple.

organsnyder• 3 years ago

My work machine has those specs. My workloads aren't massive, but it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it without any issues. It also runs Factorio almost as well as my gaming desktop.

kuchenbecker• 3 years ago

64-128GB is my current minimum due to 30+GB used by docker and a poor rdev story.

Good thing it's a corp laptop.

GaryNumanVevo2• 3 years ago

Woah! I'm glad we've got a good RDEV story, I don't miss the days when I had to deploy half of our infra on my laptop just to test a small change

mkl95• 3 years ago

I thought M1 was a godlike chip. Why is there a need to upgrade to M1+ 3 years later? For comparison, it took me about 10 years to replace my second gen i7.

ChadNauseam• 3 years ago

There really is no need unless you're doing something where you could always benefit from more juice (e.g. video editing). I compile Rust all day on my base M1 and have no complaints

charlie02• 3 years ago

Just an observation, I have an M1 Max and M3 Pro. The M3 Pros battery seems to drain much much faster than my M1 when watching YT. Wonder if this P core thing has anything to do with it.

fh93022• 3 years ago

From the independent battery tests I've seen the battery life should be noticeably better. Did you take a look at Activity Monitor to see if something is using high CPU?

IndySun• 3 years ago

Can you link to any one of the tests you've seen? I'm seeing similar results though for different reasons; and it's too early for me to call.

...From the independent battery tests I've seen...

charlie02• 3 years ago

I'll re-test. I don't use the M3 often, so it could be something else like spotlight running in the background that's causing the drain.

miyuru2• 3 years ago

M3 has AV1 hardware decoding built in, it should increase battery life in theory. Check the codec used by YT using stats for nerds.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

But no encoding :(

heavyset_go• 3 years ago

This extension lets you enable/disable codecs on YouTube[1]. It's also available for Chromium-based browsers, as well.

From what I've seen, though, is that M3 machines tend to consume more power than the M1 generation.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

lxgr2• 3 years ago

I believe Youtube just uses VP9 if you don't have AV1 hardware decoding. At least that's what consistently happens on my Mac using various browsers.

KeplerBoy• 3 years ago

Is AV1 more energy efficient than h264?

Sure, AV1 is the better, newer codec, but h264 has been around for a long time and is certainly implemented very efficiently in the HW decoder.

Synaesthesia• 3 years ago

What browser are you using? Safari?

chatmasta3• 3 years ago

Is it draining or just not charging to 100% (optimized charging)?

dd_xplore3• 3 years ago

It's absolutely mind boggling that such a powerful processor can run at a power envelope less than 10 watts!

crooked-v• 3 years ago

If the rumors about LLM stuff baked into Siri on the next iPhone are true, it will be interesting see how they make the most use of the hardware with that.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

Good Lord this may the brain transplant she has needed for so long.

smcleod2• 3 years ago

I'm really hoping for a complete replacement. Talk about a product that went downhill over time.

brandall102• 3 years ago

What's interesting is the A17 Neural Engine is about twice as powerful as it in on the M3 series - 35 TOPS vs. 18.

It's rumored the difference is to aid in photography and possibly Face ID, but of course this will be helpful for any onboard inference.

trvz• 3 years ago

I don't believe that's true, regardless of what you mean by "can run at a power envelope".

The M1/M2/M3 use 20-25 Watt at peak, but only 10% of that when idle. (But that's only in the notebooks – it goes beyond that in the Mac mini.)

The M3 Pro is basically 50% more of everything than the M3, so I'd reuse that multiplier to guess its power levels.

lend000• 3 years ago

Parent (and the article) are talking about power per core.

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

Too slow to be useful for anything interesting.

Too expensive to be useful for any IOT or general computing.

I'm sure its really useful that one time you couldn't take a flight to a location and didn't have a car so you took a bus and that bus was made in 1990 and didn't have 120V outlets retrofitted and you decided to work for 12 hours straight on things that never used GPU.

dd_xplore3• 3 years ago

Haha true that. It's really limited in terms of how well it can be integrated, however I really wish Apple would make some socket version of this(in future )for general consumers or atleast OEMs , it would be hugely successful.

The chances are close to impossible since it's Apple, and the architecture will need lot's of changes or the OEMs will have to change their motherboard design drastically to support a socketed M series chip ( storage controller, memory controller are all on the SOC)

seec• 3 years ago

Predictively you got massively downvoted but I don't understand how that is not the sentiment. People are really irrational around Apple stuff. Funniest thing is that I like macOS enough that I would buy their crap if it wasn't so absurdly expansive because of RAM pricing. I'm willing to let go of gaming and GPU apps (wasn't many in macOS anyway, because there were historically behind) but come on, not at this price... The battery life argument is a mystery to me. I wish they would figure out this would much better in a product like the Watch, instead of wasting power for useless computation, graphics or what have you...

arcticbull• 3 years ago

Without taking away from how cool that is, the Threadripper 7980X manages to run at just 3.4W/core according to GamersNexus [1]

It's pretty amazing where everyone (other than Intel) is on the perf/W scale.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDEUOoWTzGw

pram2• 3 years ago

I don’t know but I’m curious: I’d imagine at that many cores you’re probably reaching the limits of how much power the socket can realistically get? I know some motherboards have that supplemental power port.

Joel_Mckay6• 3 years ago

You know what did change, is sales people straight up lying to customers faces about M3/ARM software support.

The M3 might be nice silicon, but robbing existing customers of what they had before is borderline bait-and-switch. The only reason people even cared about the proprietary M3 was Apples name is in front of it.

Apple might be able to draw in more performance software ports, but so far the end users either love the M3... or were very annoyed to lose a chunk of their daily workflow.

Hopefully it gets better with time, but some Apple fans were sure surprised how fast the ecosystem shrank on ARM. =)

wmf• 3 years ago

What specific software did you lose?

Joel_Mckay6• 3 years ago

The M3 does amazing in many perf, but virtualization of x86 like the old intel cpu units is SOL performance wise. Other options are also technically illegal to deploy (win11 ARM emulation of x86 is patchy/grey-area given licenses) in commercial settings. Note, 86box for M3/ARM is a lifesaver for many (backup/dump hardware configuration), and just reminded me to donate something nice to their coffee fund. =)

The FOSS tool ports are often on ARM, but a lot of small/mid sized projects just don't bother to keep up with Apples evolving whimsical ecosystem. Feels like we are getting haunted by PowerPC. =)

dd_xplore3• 3 years ago

Yes! Behind all the hype, I was really surprised when Apple launched the M series. I was wondering how such a huge company can remove support for an architecture in such a small span of time(MS's legacy support has ruined us all?)

Joel_Mckay6• 3 years ago

It wasn't just Virtualization that got jettisoned, but simple interoperability like default NTFS write support. They made it very unfriendly for users to figure out, and vendors would only give product specific driver support.

Also, poof! what happened to Pantone calibrated standards... lol..

MacOS is now losing features, but maybe 3rd party utilities can keep the OS un-Nerf'd long enough to be useful.

Don't get me wrong, some users seem happy sandboxed with fewer options... other folks... not so much. =)

dimask5• 3 years ago

Rosetta, plus the fact that M-series was so much better than intel macs, made the transition period relatively painless until native ARM support became standard (almost). Also, the tight control of its ecosystem allows Apple to do things like that more easily. Plus that, basically, they had enough experience already with iPhones' SoCs and OS (the macs' SoC were based on the iPhones' ones).

lightedman• 3 years ago

"or were very annoyed to lose a chunk of their daily workflow."

That is the current experience of the 3 engineers with M3 laptops at my work. Two apps they usually use are not working properly or at all. One's already pulled out their old M2 and gotten back to work.

Joel_Mckay6• 3 years ago

You have my sympathy, and I hope the project artifacts folder is still exportable.

Best regards =)

RF_Savage• 3 years ago

Unfortunate name collision with Cortex-M3 cores.

I was expecting some new silicon area optimization revision like Cortex-M0 to Cortex-M0+, which seemed to open the floodgates to usable sub-0.2usd 32bit ARM microcontrollers.

What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?

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