It is the first time that Apple has announced not one, not two, but a total of three chipsets at its October 30 ‘Scary Fast’ event, with the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max the latest stars of the show. All three have been mass produced on the cutting-edge 3nm architecture, making them the first family of chips to be fabricated on the next-generation manufacturing process. With this improved technology, Apple is not only able to outfit each M3 member with higher CPU and GPU cores but also give them advanced technologies, which we will be talking about in-depth here, so let us get started.

All M3 chipsets get hardware-accelerated ray tracing support, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and more

The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max have varying specification differences, but there are similarities between the three, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing along with hardware-accelerated mesh shading. One other major change Apple has brought to these chips is that the GPUs have local memory that is dynamically allocated by hardware, and only the exact amount is needed for a particular task. In traditional architectures, the software determines the memory that the GPU needs to allocate. Apple’s M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max also support a variety of codecs such as H.264, HEVC, ProRes and ProRes RAW, and AV1.

Apple’s M3 features the same number of CPU cores as M1, M2, but delivers notable performance and efficiency improvements, M3 Pro & M3 Max offer increased CPU, GPU cores, more

Starting with the M3, Apple’s base chip sports 25 billion transistors, with up to 24GB support for unified memory. Apple has limited its latest silicon to an 8-core CPU (four performance and four efficiency cores) like the M1, but the company claims that this configuration is up to 35 percent faster than the M1 and up to 20 percent faster than the M2. The 10-core GPU offers Dynamic Caching and is up to 65 percent faster than the M1 and up to 20 percent faster than the M2.

Coming to the M3 Pro, Apple has increased the transistor count to 37 billion, with support for up to 36GB of unified RAM. The 12-core CPU comprises of six performance and six efficiency cores, with the entire configuration said to be 20 percent faster than the M1 Pro. Like the M3 GPU, the M3 Pro’s 18-core part supports technologies like Dynamic Caching and is up to 40 percent faster than the M1 Pro but only 10 percent faster than the M2 Pro.

Last but certainly not least, we have the M3 Max, which has 97 billion transistors and supports up to 128GB of unified RAM. The 16-core CPU features 12 performance and four efficiency cores, and it delivers some phenomenal gains over the previous-generation chipsets by being 80 percent faster than the M2 Max and a whopping 50 percent faster than the M2 Max. As for the 40-core GPU, it is 50 percent faster than the M1 Max and up to 20 percent faster than the M2 Max.

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Apple’s M3 lineup also features a faster and more efficient neural engine, with the technology giant claiming that it is up to 60 percent faster than the M1 family. Thanks to all three being mass produced on the 3nm process, there is said to be increased performance-per-watt. The company decided to compare a 12-core PC chip and says that the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max use 25 percent of the power while delivering the same performance on the CPU side, and on the GPU side of things, these SoCs only consume 20 percent of that power.

These three custom silicon will be found in the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, which will arrive in a brand new black finish and retail for $1,599 for the base model. Overall, Apple’s event was an extremely short one, but with the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max rumored for a 2024 launch, we are glad that the company pushed out those chips this year.