Apple’s newest M3 Pro is mass produced on the latest 3nm technology, giving the chipset incredible performance-per-watt attributes while consuming less power than competing chipsets. However, despite these improvements, we noticed in the specifications comparison with the M2 Pro that Apple has downgraded this custom silicon in some aspects, most notably the number of performance cores and memory bandwidth.
Total memory bandwidth on the M3 Pro is 25 percent less compared to the M2 Pro
One variant of the M2 Pro featuring a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU touts better specifications than the M3 Pro, at least on paper. For one thing, the latest chipset features an 18-core GPU, making it one core less than the M2 Pro, but that is not all that has been downgraded. Apple may have retained the number of CPU cores on both chipsets, but their configuration has been altered slightly. Where the M2 Pro features eight performance and four efficiency cores, the M3 Pro actually has fewer performance cores, sporting six of them, along with six efficiency ones.
This reduction in performance cores could be one reason why, during Apple’s event, the marketing slides only showed a 10 percent difference between the M2 Pro and the M3 Pro. It is possible that Apple has intentionally intended to lower the performance budget of the latest silicon in order to deliver more on the battery front, though we will have to wait for more tests to arrive to provide a more concrete answer. We also noticed that the memory bandwidth of the M3 Pro is lower than the M2 Pro by 25 percent.
The specifications comparison above reveals that the M3 Pro has a 150GB/s memory bandwidth, whereas the M2 Pro has a 200GB/s memory bandwidth. How much this reduction plays into real-world use, we will find out once the official benchmarks are here. If Apple has deliberately gimped the capabilities of its latest SoC, it could be to prop up battery life on the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. Unfortunately, there is no way of confirming this, so we will wait for the actual benchmarks to show up, and as always, we will update our readers.
About the author: Omar Sohail is a reporter and analyst for Wccftech's mobile section, specializing in the technology and business of the mobile industry. His expertise lies in the intricate hardware supply chain, covering developments in semiconductor manufacturing, chip lithography, and camera sensor technology.
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