Apple has recently announced the launch of its latest M3 chip family, which includes M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. These chips are the industry’s first 3-nanometer chips for personal computers and feature a next-generation GPU architecture with performance improvements, a faster CPU and Neural Engine, and support for more unified memory. The new M3 family of chips was unveiled at Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ special event on Monday, where the company also introduced new MacBook Pro and iMac models.
The next-generation CPU in M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max features architectural improvements to the performance and efficiency cores, which are up to 30 percent faster than those in the M1 family. Each chip in the M3 family features a unified memory architecture, which delivers high bandwidth, low latency, and high power efficiency.
M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max also have an enhanced Neural Engine to accelerate powerful machine learning (ML) models. The Neural Engine is up to 60 percent faster than in the M1 family of chips.
All three chips in the M3 family also have an advanced media engine that provides hardware acceleration to the most popular video codecs, including H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW. For the first time, the media engine supports AV1 decoding, enabling power-efficient playback of streaming services to further extend battery life.
M3 features 25 billion transistors — 5 billion more than M2. It has a 10-core GPU featuring the next-generation architecture that is 65 percent faster than M1 for graphics performance.
M3 Pro consists of 37 billion transistors and an 18-core GPU that delivers fast performance when working on more graphics-intensive tasks. The GPU is up to 40 percent faster than M1 Pro. Support for unified memory goes up to 36GB, enabling larger projects to be worked on using the MacBook Pro when users are on the go. The 12-core CPU design has six performance cores and six efficiency cores.