<story><title>M3 Macs: there&apos;s more to performance than counting cores</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2023/11/03/m3-macs-theres-more-to-performance-than-counting-cores/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubefox</author><text>This seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrlk</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a mixture of several problems:&lt;p&gt;* TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive)&lt;p&gt;* Brain drain from Apple&amp;#x27;s chip design teams over the last few years&lt;p&gt;* Tim Cook trying to push the average selling price up to keep revenue growth going in the face of sales declines (e.g. hobbling memory bandwidth, reducing the number of performance cores for M3 Pro)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t expect there to be a M1 style generational leap for a long time, expect 2010s Intel style yearly performance gains from here on out.</text></comment>
<story><title>M3 Macs: there&apos;s more to performance than counting cores</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2023/11/03/m3-macs-theres-more-to-performance-than-counting-cores/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubefox</author><text>This seems to be a lot of effort to rationalize the surprisingly small performance increase from M2 to M3. Initially the assumption was that M2 to M3 would be a bigger step than M1 to M2, not a smaller one. Perhaps TSMC 3nm is showing the limits of scaling?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>llm_nerd</author><text>Apple seems to be focusing on efficiency more than anything, and maybe a little more market segmentation where the lesser chips are less competitive with the bigger chips. The Pro offers fewer performance cores, trading them for efficiency cores. It has reduced memory bandwidth.&lt;p&gt;From a generational perspective, the M3 Max is offering the same level of performance as the M2 Ultra. That&amp;#x27;s amazing as the m3 max is 12p&amp;#x2F;4e vs 16p&amp;#x2F;8e in the m2 Ultra. The M3 Ultra should be a substantial lift.</text></comment>