Apple had already provided us with two of the new MacBook Pros with 14-inch displays before the start of sales: one with the normal M3 processor and one with the fast M3 Max. In between is the also new M3 Pro, but with less performance . and GPU cores than the predecessor M2 Pro and therefore hardly any improvements can be expected. In order to have such a chip in the test, we ordered a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro with a 16-inch display.
Better gradation of processors
Previously, the difference between Pro and Max chips on Apple Silicon was the number of graphics cores, twice the memory bandwidth and twice to three times the maximum memory capacity. However, the CPU, which is particularly important for general performance, worked equally quickly in the Pro and Max. That has changed with the M3 Pro.
When fully expanded, it only has half as many performance cores as the M3 Max (6 to 12) and only two more efficiency cores (6 to 4). The latter also runs a little faster at 2748 MHz than the M3 Max (2568 MHz). Apple houses 37 billion transistors on the M3 Pro’s die, compared to 40 billion on its predecessor. Compared to this, the number of possible performance cores fell by two to six and the number of efficiency cores increased from four to six. The clock speeds increased from 2.4 to 2.7 GHz and from 3.5 to 4.1 GHz. In addition, Apple reduced the number of graphics cores from 19 to 18. The exciting question now was: Will the M3 Pro be able to outperform its predecessor or will it even fall behind it?
