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Comment by mgrandl | Hacker News Reader

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…

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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.

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.

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.

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

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