M3 Pro Has Fewer Performance Cores, Lower Memory Bandwidth Than Previous-Generation M2 Pro, Indicating A Notable Downgrade

wccftech.com:

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.

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