Apple Announces M3, M3 Pro & M3 Max, First 3nm SoCs For Macs, Up To 92 Billion Transistors, 16-Core CPU Options, Incredible Efficiency & More

wccftech.com:

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.

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.

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