At its Scary Fast event, Apple has just unveiled the new chips for its high-end MacBook Pro models. The new Apple M3 Pro and M3 Max bring 3nm to the Mac chip range.
Apple’s new and most powerful laptop chips are here, available for the new 14-inch and 16-inch M3 MacBook Pro devices. But how do they compare?
Apple M3 Pro vs Apple M3 Max
Unsurprisingly, Apple isn’t about putting its own chips head-to-head but we can do it for them. The Apple M3 Pro chip has been boosted up to a 12-core CPU with six performance cores and six efficiency cores, alongside an 18-core GPU and up to 36GB unified memory. Apple claims these new specs will offer up to 30% faster CPU performance for single-threaded tasking than the M1 Pro while the GPU is up to 40% faster.
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By comparison, the M3 Max dons a whopping 16-core CPU, with 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, as well as a 40-core GPU. You can already see that’s quite a jump from the M3 Pro. On top of the cores, the M3 Max can be loaded with up to 128GB unified memory. Apple states the GPU performance of the M3 Max is up to 80% faster than the M1 Max version. The SSD storage available with the M3 Max also comes in higher than the M3 Pro, with the latter topping out at 4TB but the former reaching up to 8TB.
The Apple M3 Max chip will certainly cost you more money, if you’d like to equip your 14 or 16-inch MacBook Pro with it. The 14-inch M3 Max starts at £3,299/$3,199 while the 14-inch M3 Pro model begins at £2,099/$1,999.
Apple isn’t showcasing that the M3 Max will be able to offer any features that the M3 Pro can’t, so it’ll come down to differences in raw power and what they can achieve inside applications. The true difference in capabilities between these two chips will have to be something we uncover in our testing of these new Apple products come review time.
