* TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive)
* Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years
* 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)
I don'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.
It’s true but the problem with the GPU is Apple’s addiction to RAM money. Yes the GPU is improving in performance but it does you no good if it has to share a tiny amount of system RAM with the CPU.
The GPU is critical to future profits though. Apple really wants your monthly subscription to Apple Arcade and they want to expand in other game areas which is why they've been paying AAA companies to optimize for Mac. This also ties into their VR headset where gaming will be one of the core features.
Hardly any AAA companies are optimising for the Apple GPU. MoltenVK is where all the interest is.
Even if they did, there is very little in Apple Arcade which taxes the GPU, most target the lowest common denominator in terms of supported iOS/phone combinations.
The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles, but for whatever reason that wasn’t pursued, so now we have a tonne of casual games and re-releases of old titles.
> The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles
Can you prove that statement? I bet you can't, cause it's simply not true. Every Arcade title is playable from an iPhone to a Mac by way of Apple TV. It was never going to get AAA titles.
I read that the bandwidth is 50% lower on the M3 combined with a lower CPU core coun. This reduction will impact inferrence performance.
It maybe better to stick with M2 series if you really really think spending $10k on a laptop mac to do inferrence slowly (but faster than a plain PC of course) make sense.
Weren't all of the new M3 Macs announced the same price as they previously were or lower? Same with the recently announced iPhones? Or am I mis-remembering? Seems like prices not increasing given all the recent inflation are actually a price decrease pretty much across the board not an increase on the average selling price?
> 20% increase on performance is compared to M1 not, M2
Nope.
> The M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of about 3,000 and 11,700, respectively, in the Geekbench 6 database. When you compare these scores to those of the M2's single-core and multi-core scores (around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively), the M3 chip is indeed up to 20% faster like Apple claims.
> 400 watts is on a desktop chip where there is no concept of battery life.
Yes, and in exchange for that ridiculous 400 watt power draw, Intel saw negligible performance gains.
> In some areas, the extra clock speeds available on the Core i9-14900K show some benefit, but generally speaking, it won't make much difference in most areas.
Intel only wishes they could hit a 20% gain in exchange for all that increased power draw and heat. As that review noted the best improvement they saw in any of the common benchmarks was just 6%.
I wonder how much thermal throttling is going on with these benchmarks? 400W seems ridiculously difficult to cool. The 13900 was difficult if not impossible to cool for throughput without water cooling.
* TSMC N3B being a bit of a flop (yield issues, too expensive)
* Brain drain from Apple's chip design teams over the last few years
* 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)
I don'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.