Apple M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, Three Chips And Six Systems

See What The A17 Pro Chip Is Capable Of

Apple is showing off their new 3nm chips today, which are the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max.  The M3 is relatively physically unchanged from the previous generation with four P and four E cores, 10 GPU cores, a limit of 24GB of RAM and 100GB/s memory bandwidth.  The M3 Pro is a bit different with two P cores becoming E cores so that there are six of each, it also drops a GPU core for a total of 18, a maximum of 36GB RAM and peak memory bandwidth of 150GB/s.  Last but not least is the M3 Max with 12 P cores and four E cores, four more P cores than the previous generation, GPU cores increased by two to 40, it can handle 128GB RAM and has an impressive 400GB/s memory bandwidth.

The physical change are not the whole story, the new M3 series GPU cores now have hardware accelerated ray tracing as well as Dynamic Caching which is intended to allow more tasks to make use of those GPUs simultaneously and they have added native support for AV1 encoding.  

Those stats above only account for the full version of the three chips, for Apple have also released so called Entry Level versions of these three chips.  Those chips have less GPU cores enabled, lower RAM limits and in the case of the M3 Pro and M3 Max they have less P cores.  The memory bandwidth on two of the three chips remain the same, however the entry level M3 Max sees it drop to 300GB/s.

Ars Technica delves into the details more deeply here, but so far we have yet to see the new chips in action.