M3 Series: Key aspects you should know about Apple's latest PC silicon

Apple on Monday evening unveiled the new line of MacBook Pro and iMac with the latest M3 series silicons.

As promised, Apple's latest 3nm class M3 chipsets come with significant upgrades in terms of performance, faster CPU speeds, and GPU efficiency over the previous iterations.

M3 silicon family: Key aspects of the latest Apple chipset you should know

--The M3 family's efficiency cores are 30 per cent and 50 per cent better than M2 and M1 series, respectively.

--The M3 series' Rendering speeds are up to 2.5x faster than on the M1 family of chips.

--The M3's CPU performance cores and efficiency cores are 30 per cent and 50 percent faster than those in M1, respectively.

-- The M3 family of silicons boasts Dynamic Caching. Unlike traditional GPUs, M3 can efficientlly allocate the use of local memory in hardware in real time. With Dynamic Caching, only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. This is said to be an industry first, and a massive leap in the new GPU architecture design in terms of high efficiency of chipsets.

-- Also, M3 family brings hardware-based raytracing to Mac devices for the first time. Playing games on the MacBook Pro and iMac will be better than ever before. They will deliver immersive gaming experience.

Add to that, Game developers will be able to make use of ray tracing capability on new Mac devices to deliver more accurate shadows and reflections, creating deeply immersive environments.

-- The new GPU on M3 brings hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the Mac. It promises to deliver greater capability and efficiency to geometry processing, and enabling more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. 

--The M3 family's Neural Engine is up to 60 percent faster than in the M1 family of chips. This promises to make AI/ML workflows function even faster while keeping data on the device to preserve privacy.

--M3's family's Neural Engine performance is 15 per cent and 60 per cent faster than M2 and M1 series, respectively

-- M3's family silicons promise longest battery life on PC, up to 22 hours, 11 hours more than the M1-based PCs.

Key aspects of regular M3 silicon

-- M3 features 25 billion transistors — 5 billion more than M2. It has a 10-core GPU featuring the next-generation architecture that is 65 percent faster than M1 for graphics performance.

--M3 has an 8-core CPU, with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, that is up to 35 percent faster than M1 for CPU performance.

-- M3 supports up to 24GB of unified memory(RAM).

3nm class M3 silicon come with significant upgrades over M2 and M1 series chipsets.

Key aspects of M3 Pro silicon

--M3 Pro comes with 37 billion transistors and an 18-core GPU, which is enough to deliver extremely fast performance when working on more graphics-intensive tasks.

--M3 Pro features a 12-core CPU design with six performance cores and six efficiency cores, offering single-threaded performance that is up to 30 percent faster than M1 Pro.

--M3 Pro's GPU is said to be up to 40 per cent faster than M1 Pro.

--M3 Pro supports up to 32GB unified memory (RAM)

Key aspects of M3 silicon

Key aspects of M3 Max

-- M3 Max houses 92 billion transistors to ensure smoothest and fastest performance on PC than any rival brands to date

--M3 Max comes with a 16-core CPU features 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, and promises up to 80 percent faster performance than M1 Max.

--M3 Max also supports two ProRes engines, and with the PC will work silky smooth during video post-production work on even the highest-resolution content fast and fluid, whether using DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro.

--M3 Max comes with a 40-core GPU and is said to be up to 50 percent faster than M1 Max.

--M3 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory. With this, PC users will be able to perform extreme workflows involving Artificial Intelligence coding for large language models.

Apple is offering an M3 with a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a 24-inch iMac. And, 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro will be available with M3 Pro and M3 Max options too.

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