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Comment by tomaskafka | Hacker News Reader

My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded:

- M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark)

- M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro

So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 Pro and am very happy, having spent less than half of what the base M3 Pro would cost, and got 85% of its power (and also, considering that you generally need to have at least 33 to 50 % faster CPU to even notice the difference :)).

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The M3 Pro being nerfed has been parroted on the Internet since the announcement. Practically it’s a great choice. It’s much more efficient than the M2 Pro at slightly better performance. That’s what I am looking for in a laptop. I don’t really have a usecase for the memory bandwidth…

Everyone has a different needs - for me, even M1 Pro has more battery life than I use or need, so further efficiency differences bring little value.

I picked up an M3Pro/11/14/36GB/1TB to 'test' over the long holiday return period to see if I need an M3 Max. For my workflow (similar to blog post) - I don't! I'm very happy with this machine.

Die shots show the CPU cores take up so little space compared to GPUs on both the Pro and Max... I wonder why.

I don’t really have a usecase for even more battery life, so I’d rather have it run faster

The M3 Pro and Max get virtually identical results in battery tests, e.g. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-bat.... The Pro may be a perfectly fine machine, but Apple didn't remove cores to increase battery life; they did it to lower costs and upsell the Max.

It might be the case that the yield on the chips is low, so they decided to use “defective” chips in the M3 Pro, and the non-defective in the M3 Max.

In all M generations, the max and pro are effectively different layouts so can’t be put down to binning. Each generation did offer binned versions of the Pro and Max with fewer cores though.

These aren't binned chips... the use of efficiency cores does reduce transistor count considerably which could improve yields.

That said, while the transistor count of the M2 Pro -> M3 Pro did decrease, it went up quite a bit from the M2 -> M3.

It seems most likely Apple is just looking to differentiate the tiers.

AI is the main use case for memory bandwidth that I know of. Local LLM’s are memory bandwidth limited when running inference, so once you fall into that trap you end up wanting the 400 gb/s max memory bandwidth of the m1/m2/m3 max, paired with lots and lots of RAM. Apple pairs memory size and bandwidth upgrades to core counts a lot more in m3 which makes the m3 line-up far more expensive than the m2 line-up to reach comparable LLM performance. Them touting AI as a use case for the m3 line-up in the keynote was decidedly odd, as this generation is a step back when it comes to price vs performance.

My experience was similar: In real world compile times, the M1 Pro still hangs quite closely to the current laptop M2 and M3 models. Nothing as significant as the differences in this article.

I could depend on the language or project, but in head-to-head benchmarks of identical compile commands I didn’t see any differences this big.

That's interesting you saw less of an improvement in the M2 than we saw in this article.

I guess not that surprising given the different compilation toolchains though, especially as even with the Go toolchain you can see how specific specs lend themselves to different parts of the build process (such as the additional memory helping linker performance).

You're not the only one to comment that the M3 is weirdly capped for performance. Hopefully not something they'll continue into the M4+ models.

That's what Xcode benchmarks seem to say.

Yep, there appears to be no reason for getting M3 Pro instead of M2 Pro, but my guess is that after this (unfortunate) adjustment, they got the separation they wanted (a clear hierarchy of Max > Pro > base chip for both CPU and GPU power), and can then improve all three chips by a similar amount in the future generations.

> ”Yep, there appears to be no reason for getting M3 Pro instead of M2 Pro”

There is if you care about efficiency / battery life.

Don’t you get better single core performance in m3 pro? Iirc it has stronger performance and efficiency cores as well.

I also made this calculation recently and ended up getting an M1 Pro with maxed out memory and disk. It was a solid deal and it is an amazing computer.

I love my M1 MacBook Air for iOS development. One thing, I'd like to have from Pro line is the screen, and just the PPI part. While 120Hz is a nice thing to have, it won't happen on Air laptops.

Basically the Pareto effect in choosing the right cpu vs cost

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