Apple Event announced for October 30th: 'Scary Fast'

[CaseySJ]

The M series chips are based on iPhone chips but made for desktop, yeah congratulations Apple for making that giant leap in innovation .

I think it’s fair to say that improvements to the SoC are more meaningful to more people than some of the auxiliary features.

Improvements to the SoC include such things as:

• Speed of E cores
• Speed of P cores
• Number of P cores
  • M3 Max has 12 P-cores
  • M2 Max and M1 Max have 8 P-cores
• Number of E cores
• Speed of Neural Engine
• Number of Neural cores
• Improvements to GPU architecture (which has been dramatically reworked in M3 and includes hardware Ray Tracing and Mesh Shading)
• Number and speed of GPU cores
• Media decode/encode engines (AV1 decode engine has been added to M3)
• Quantity of memory (much more memory is supported by M3 family than its predecessors)
• Screen brightness (up by 100 nits)
• Battery life

WiFi, BT and HDMI were upgraded earlier this year with the M2 MacBook Pros (Wi-Fi 6E, BT 5.3, HDMI 2.1).

However on the downside:

• Memory bandwidth on M3 and M3 Pro is reduced, but we don’t know the real world implication. If overall performance is still as fast as Apple says, then do we really care about memory bandwidth?
• Same webcam, which is okay
• Same form factor with notch, which is okay although I really want to see the the notch replaced with Dynamic Island or something much less obtrusive. The notch really interferes with menu bar icons. I say this from first hand experience with my own MacBook Pro. I really want it gone, but it’s something we can live with for now

MacRumors has a very nice table comparing M1, M2 and M3 MacBook Pros:

2023 MacBook Pro Buyer's Guide: 20+ Differences Compared

Apple has refreshed the MacBook Pro's hardware with a full set of M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, but what exactly do the latest machines bring to...

www.macrumors.com

Here's an excerpt:

 

[pastrychef]

Base M3 Geekbench 6 scores are popping up...

 

[phunguss]

Do I really need this "Bleeding edge" new M3? Heck no. I will keep Hackintoshing until they streamline the M9, then maybe I will migrate. Just no fun working on a closed system.

 

[c-o-pr]

Base M3 Geekbench 6 scores are popping up...

View attachment 573749

Amazing, late 2023 macbook pro has 1.35x singlecore and equal multicore to early 2021 11th gen i9 @ max OC running at 270W.

I am surprised that Apple can release multiple iterations of an entirely new arch with moment-by-moment class-leading perf at as fast a rate as the hack community can adapt to simple increments of an existing arch.

And Apple is consistently adding prestige design elements and features while holding line on prices.

The pace of change is incredible.

 

[pastrychef]

A few M3 Max scores have appeared...

 

[c-o-pr]

Do I really need this "Bleeding edge" new M3? Heck no. I will keep Hackintoshing until they streamline the M9, then maybe I will migrate. Just no fun working on a closed system.

Once a system is working, go with it!

Re fun, I enjoy it too. Even though it's not really productive, it helps me feel that I'm a creative part of a scene. I don't like the feeling being led down a primrose path by giant companies that wants to milk me for their profits. Of course that's unavoidable.

This hobby causes me cognitive dissonance because the point of the PC is supposed to be about all the things I can do with it beyond itself. Nerding out on the build is a sort of work in its own right... It's like I'm proving to myself I'm not a bot by being inefficient.

But this feeling is very much a trait of the silicon valley garage tech scene. Why wasn't just using the phone system enough for Wozniak? Why didn't he just pick up the phone and call someone with the Good News? The phone system was already in place and working. Why did he noodle about the Blue Box? The phreaker of legend Capt Crunch sort of did make that call, but the good news was "I can hack the phone system with a whistle included in a box of sugary breakfast cereal!" All of this has become a strange mythology. Sergey & Larry and their Legos.

Obviously the seeds of creativity are in such play, in finding out what works with fuzzy purpose, and discovering power where others just shuffle along.

There's a great feeling of making the most of what's at hand.

(P.S. I just looked up Draper and since I last read an issue of 2600 he's become as noted for accusations of acting like a pervert as for hacking, so 'oh well'. I did't intend to impugn anyone by mentioning Crunch, it's just a stream of consciousness.)

 

[trs96]

As an owner of a M1 Max MacBook Pro from 2021, I am glad to see progress in some areas and stagnation in others!

The progress makes me envious. The stagnation makes me content with what I have.

Max Tech YT channel is saying the same thing. Most M1 MBP owners don't see any real reason to upgrade to M3 MBPs. Which (they claim) is why they're not selling as fast as Apple expects. I believe Apple is primarily trying to lure Intel MBP owners into buying new Apple Silicon. I know many people that have kept using their Intel MBPs for 8-10 years. Now with OCLP as a viable option, you can keep them going a little longer. Why pay $1600 or more for a new M3 based laptop ? That seems to be the primary reason for slower than expected sales. It will just take time and some lower prices on these new laptops to get them selling. Once Intel support does finally stop, that will also be a big boost for new Mac sales.

See the video starting at 2:50.

 

[pastrychef]

Max Tech YT channel is saying the same thing. Most M1 MBP owners don't see any real reason to upgrade to M3 MBPs. Which (they claim) is why they're not selling as fast as Apple expects. I believe Apple is primarily trying to lure Intel MBP owners into buying new Apple Silicon. I know many people that have kept using their Intel MBPs for 8-10 years. Now with OCLP as a viable option, you can keep them going a little longer. Why pay $1600 or more for a new M3 based laptop ? That seems to be the primary reason for slower than expected sales. It will just take time and some lower prices on these new laptops to get them selling. Once Intel support does finally stop, that will also be a big boost for new Mac sales.

See the video starting at 2:50.

As someone who's still rocking a hackintosh laptop, the top reason why I want an Apple Silicon laptop is for the battery life.

 

[ori69]

A few M3 Max scores have appeared...

View attachment 573768

It's now a comparison of processors in Cinebench 23:

https://www.facebook.com/HaMacNews/posts/pfbid0eKgg2ckJEbUT6J9dS8oB9KaGy942taGroq6CU8GV99rk9Xa2Wjm1fzy46H1Re7oJl

 

[c-o-pr]

It's now a comparison of processors in Cinebench 23...

Assuming those stats are bumping the rev limiter, the 12950HX is pulling 55W and the M3 Max pulls 30W. So that's 2x per W to AppleSi.

I couldn't quickly find stats for low power efficiency, so I have only a wild guess that AppleSi might mean the diff between a day of use on battery vs. half-day.

Microsoft never talks up Windows features for power but the PC industry has a track record of being heavy-handed re power consumption— benchmarking as fast is always more important than a balance of traits to PC. Intel cares very much, but their mobile is downsized desktop, and MSFT abandoned mobile long ago.

OTOH mobile efficiency is the baseline from which the AppleSi has grown, and if Apple doesn't do power well it spoils the heart of their business. So it's remarkable that AppleSi is holding its own in raw CPU against its far better established architectural rival.

I believe that if a detailed story on total system balance were to be told, I will be surprised that IA mobile makes a half-decent showing.

Geekbench can't show off a systems balance of traits at all. And Cinebench is a single workload, whereas GeekB is at least a composite of 10 or so workloads. So we've got a yardstick, but it provides no insights into the most important evolutionary advances of these designs, which are about the SW stack's interplay between dedicated units, the cache-core complex, the GPU-as-an attached processor suitable for a divided realm of workstation-class compute (3D vs tensor/AI) and the primacy of efficiency in network+storage+security.

To restate, Apple's approach is about obviously about bringing the right amount of power to where it's needed in an overall balanced design plan for a personal device and its developers-developers-developers (to quote old Balmer) while MSFT as competition is a herd of cats dragging around some very antiquated assumptions about "PC", not the least of which are phat gaming and backwards compatibility.

Intel, bless their hearts, completely gets this balance perspective, which is shown by the fact that their server / workstation products are no longer applicable to Apple at all. Where brute force is valued, Intel continues to offer 25K–50K workstation-class designs. Apple had to track the lower-end these Intel chipsets over a decade in the form of the 2023–2019 Mac Pros, where in retrospect it's obvious why they let the Mac Pro languish, because they believed they would succeed on the M-series (mobile to Max)— And they did.