Apple has announced the launch of its third generation ‘Apple Silicon’ M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, chips touting ‘dramatically increased performance’ that bring new capabilities to its machines. These are the first personal computer chips built using the industry-leading 3-nanometer process technology, allowing more transistors to be packed into a smaller space and improving speed and efficiency, the company said on Monday.
The M3 series will be featured in the company’s refreshed MacBook Pro and iMac lineup.
The new chips feature a next-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) that represents a significant leap forward in graphics architecture, bringing higher speeds and added efficiency to the chips, Apple announced.
The M3 series also brings a new technology called Dynamic Caching which, unlike traditional GPUs, allocates the use of local memory in hardware in real time; meaning only the exact amount of memory needed is allocated for each task, allowing a dramatic increase in the average utilisation of the GPU, which significantly increases performance for the most demanding tasks, the technology giant said.
According to Apple, the M3 series also brings new rendering features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading to MacOS for the first time while making render times by 2.5x when compared to M1 chips. A new media engine now includes support for AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) decode, providing more efficient and high-quality video experiences from streaming services – AV1 is an open, royalty-free video coding format for online video transmissions.
The M3 series will bring massive enhancements and new features to the new MacBook Pro and iMac, according to Apple.
“Apple silicon has completely redefined the Mac experience. Every aspect of its architecture is designed for performance and power efficiency. With 3-nanometer technology, a next-generation GPU architecture, a higher-performance CPU, faster Neural Engine, and support for even more unified memory, M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max are the most advanced chips ever built for a personal computer,” said Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji.
The M3 GPU is able to deliver the same performance as M1 using nearly half the power, and up to 65 percent more performance at its peak while the unified memory architecture of chips deliver high bandwidth, low latency, unmatched power efficiency, and support up to 24GB of fast, unified memory, touted Apple.
The power-efficient performance of M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max helps the company’s new MacBook Pro achieve 22 hours of battery life, Apple said.
The M3 series of the iMac and MacBook Pro lineup are available for order through the company’s websites in 27 countries and regions while shipping is set to start on 7 November. Purchases on the company’s websites may be subject to regional sales, product and feature restrictions.