Last week, Apple announced its third-generation silicon for the Mac, suitably named M3. Unlike previous launches, it unveiled the entire M3 family all at once, pulling the cover off M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The new chips are being offered in the MacBook Pro and iMac, and systems with those chips are currently en route to people who bought them on launch day. However, some have already received them, allowing for some early benchmarks. Of the trio of new chips, the M3 Pro has now been run in Geekbench, and its performance is puzzling, to say the least.
The Geekbench numbers for the M3 Pro have been posted online by Vadim Yuryev from the YouTube channel MaxTech. The scores show 3,035 for single-core and 15,173 for multi-core, which means the M3 Pro offers a 14% gain in single-core performance compared with the previous gen but only a 6% gain in multi-core performance. That's quite disappointing, given the company's move to TSMC's newest 3nm process. However, at launch, the M3 Pro was called out for being possibly nerfed by Apple due to its lowered memory bandwidth and the removal of two of its performance cores, so this isn't entirely surprising either.
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To recap, the M2 and M3 Pro chips have a 12-core design, but the M2 Pro offered an 8+4 design for performance and efficiency cores. The M3 Pro uses a 6+6 design, with two fewer performance cores but two additional efficiency cores. The revamped M3 Max has 12 performance cores, up from eight in the previous generation. According to MacRumors, this allows the M3 Max to be up to 45% faster than its predecessor in multi-core. Early tests also show the base M3 is 20% faster than the M2. Sizable generation gains can be had with the M3 but not on the M3 Pro for some reason.
Apple can make these chips faster depending on how it rations out its precious cores, but it seems to have hobbled the M3 Pro in this regard, possibly to push people to upgrade to the more expensive Max chip. The new MacBook Pros are expected to arrive in reviewers' hands this week, so we'll be hearing much more about this topic shortly.
Still, it's a surprising turn of events, given the hype surrounding the world's first 3nm SoC. Apple has generally been reliably offering more power with each generation of its M3 silicon. However, M3 came out much sooner than expected. The M2 was launched in June 2022, but the Pro and Max launched in January 2023. They're not even a year old and have already been relegated to the trash heap of silicon history. It stands to reason the M2 chips didn't sell very well, so Apple wanted to get the M3 out ASAP to reverse that trend.
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