Three M3 chips could land in Monday's Mac line refresh
Apple's "Scary Fast" event on Monday night will see the launch of three M3-series chips, to go with the high-end MacBook Pro and 24-inch iMac refreshes that are expected to take place.
24-inch iMac
Monday night's "Scary Fast" Apple Event is anticipated to focus on Mac, with updates and chip launches suspected to form the bulk of the presentation. There have been some rumors about what will be shown, and a Sunday report has seemingly gone along with the forecasts.
Writing in Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter, Mark Gurman claims that there will be three new Mac chips launched at the event, in the M3 series.
The main M3 will be a 3-nanometer chip with eight CPU cores, four each of high-performance and efficiency varieties, and up to 10 cores for graphics processing. While this will match the M2 chip's core counts, faster core performance and improved memory configuration support is expected.
The M3 Pro has apparently been tested in multiple configurations, including one with 12 CPU cores evenly split between performance and efficiency as well as 18 graphics cores, and another with 14 CPU cores and 20 graphics cores.
Lastly, the M3 Max has already been tested in a 16-core CPU variety, with 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. A 40-core GPU has also been tested, as well as a 32-core version.
As for the devices that these chips will go into, Gurman says the MacBook Pro line will get an update. However, since on October 27 he wrote that there wouldn't be a 13-inch MacBook Pro refresh at the event, this may mean it will just be for the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
On the desktop side, Gurman continues to think that the 24-inch iMac will finally get its long-awaited update.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Meteor Lake is fabbed on Intel 7nm while Apple Silicon is on TSMC 3nm. That's too big of a fab advantage. Intel will do what they have been doing. Their high end laptop chips will consume 70 to 100 Watts for about 1 to 2 minutes than go down to 45 to 55 Watts depending on model. Mid-range Meteor Lake laptop chips will probably be 25 to 35 Watts sustained. It will have pretty good performance, probably class leading, but will pay for it with more heat, more noise and less runtime.
Meteor Lake is also a multi-chip package with silicon bridges between them. This will consume more power over the monolithic chip design Apple is expected to use for the M3 generation. So, the idle power consumption will be interesting to see with Meteor Lake. It's architecture will allow Intel to scale their packages in multiple axes though. Very flexible.
so bottom line is—- we’ll find out when it’s shipping in actual products.
Intel said this for the prior generations of fabs too. They said Intel 10nm was equivalent to TSMC 7nm too. I don't think they ever got close to TSMC 7nm densities on their Intel 10nm fab.
The ultimate arbiter is simply Intel continues to need 3x to 4x the per core power consumption to match Apple silicon per core power consumption. If Intel had similar transistor densities, that wouldn't happen. They'd be a lot closer, like 1.2x to 1.5x power consumption numbers over Apple silicon.
The A17 "Pro" label makes more sense knowing that M3 Pro and M3 Max are likely here, released more or less at the same time. They will share the mesh shading and hardware ray tracing graphics elements.
To my mind, the only remaining question is the M3. Maybe this means some kind of change in how the graphics are handled, versus how they were handled in the M1 and M2 generations. Before, M1 could have been named A14X, and M2 could have been named A15X. M1 Pro/Max and M2 Pro/Max stood apart. I'll guess this is no longer the case. M3 won't be a derivative of the A17, rather, the A17 Pro is a derivative of the M3.
So the new M3 iMac will have mesh shading and hardware ray tracing, and tomorrow night we'll see Resident Evil Village again, this time on the late 2023 iMac with M3 Pro.
Or, you know, the iMac will get M2 and M2 Pro, and there won't be any M3. Or some other combination that makes perfect sense in retrospect...
Many people use the iMac in both Work and Home applications and the timing is right
Apple hear our request and make us happy
Running non-graphics intensive applications (many open and doing their own thing in the background), web browser with lots of tabs, DEVONThink, Screen sharing to another Mac, Omnifocus, many chat apps, a game idling in the background waiting for me to get back to (simple Arcade game)... basically using the laptop without worrying about battery and power draw (does not power down anything).... it draws between 15 and 16 watts from the wall. I am guessing if I disconnected the 4 external monitors and just use it as a portable in the same manner - probably 8 to 10 watts. If I crunch it with lots of graphics processing (creative work)... I might at most push it up to 60 watts.
I just don't see Intel coming close to that with an x86 processor, which always has to have a hardware transcoder adding a bit of inefficiency to convert the old x86 instruction set to a RISCish micro-ops before executing the code (Intel was running into a wall with CISC based architecture long ago so they effectively did a wonderful job and genius level design to keep it in the processor... and as long as they had the best node out there... they were hard to beat in their era. Time always catches up though... and unless Intel has some magic pixie dust this time around... I don't see them being on the same level... HOWEVER, for a windows user - it will likely seem like a super major upgrade from prior generations for laptops and may keep their eyes from wandering too much.
Hopefully they will go all in on HW RT across all their launched computer devices to ensure TAM growth for the games developers or the push is pretty much meaningless.
Another would be significant Neural engine boosts to prepare for on device generative AI models. Snapdragon is already touting it so Apple cannot be behind.
Overall the M* chips have shown to have great horsepower for genAI but Apple needs to make it a concerted and conscious push rather than a happy coincidence.
I am very much hoping for M3 HW RT + Neural Engine next generation all the things across Macs, iPad Pro and dare I say it - Apple TV.
Generative Fill like tech would be epic to help Apple TV clean, upscale and improve bad streaming video quality, compensate for network glitches etc.
Snapdragon 8 Gen3 has thrown down a useful gauntlet and I can see Apple loving the competitive challenge.