Has Apple deliberately nerfed the M3 Pro CPU? And for what reason?

From Apple’s slides starting at 10:29:

M3 = 35% faster CPU than M1; 20% faster than M2

M3 Pro = 20% faster CPU than M1 Pro; No comparison to M2 Pro was given! 🤔

M3 Max = 80% faster than M1 Max; 50% faster than M2 Max

When Apple announced the M2 Pro they claimed it was 20% faster than M1 Pro. So are we to assume M3 Pro has no performance improvement this gen?

They’ve reduced the number of performance cores from eight to six, and as per the OP memory bandwidth at 150GB/sec is lower than the 200GB/sec of the M1 Pro.

It seems reducing the number of performance cores in favour of efficiency cores has eliminated any overall performance uplift M3 Pro had over M2 Pro. We’ll have to wait for benchmarks to be certain, but I’m sure Apple’s omission of a comparison to M2 Pro is very telling.

These things already had incredible battery life, I’m not sure why Apple would choose to sacrifice performance for more battery life? The people buying these machines, myself included, are pros that need performance, and the rest of the M3 family has CPU performance improvements, so why not M3 Pro?

  • @McnstB
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    18 months ago

    Seems like a good direction.

    These things already had incredible performance, I’m not sure why Apple would choose to sacrifice battery life for more performance? The people buying these machines, myself included, are pros that need battery life.

    What I’m actually disappointed with, is that M3 is still limited to 24GB RAM, just like M2.

    Yes, that’s much better than just 16GB in M1, but, come on, what is this, enough for like 10 browser tabs in Chrome?

    They’re basically forcing me to get M2 Pro if I need more than 24GB; well, at least I don’t have to sacrifice the battery life as much as with M3 Max, but it’s still extra CPU I don’t need.