In a few hours, at one in the morning tomorrow, Tuesday the 31st, Apple will hold a very special event with a very descriptive name: ‘Scary Fast’. All signs point to the launch of new Macs, but above all to the presentation of their new Apple M3, which will also not only arrive in its standard version, but – according to Bloomberg – also in two much more powerful configurations.
3 nanometers. This photolithographic process will be the main protagonist of chips that will take the lead in this very important section. The lower that number, the denser the chips can be. This allows many more transistors to be integrated, and achieve those leaps in power and efficiency that make the difference. No other manufacturer today offers this type of chips, but Apple will achieve it thanks to its exclusive agreement with TSMC, the largest semiconductor manufacturer on the planet.
Apple M3. The new SoC (System-on-Chip) will have a CPU with eight cores (four high-performance, four high-efficiency) and a GPU with up to 10 cores. It is the same configuration that was used in the M2, but in the M3 there will be, according to Bloomberg, important improvements in the memory subsystem and each core will be faster and more efficient than its predecessors.
Apple M3 Pro. Next in line will be an SoC with a 12-core CPU (six high-performance and six high-efficiency) and an 18-core GPU. There will be an even more ambitious version of this SoC that will have 14 CPU cores and 20 cores in its GPU.
Apple M3 Max. In this step, the SoC will have a variant that will have 16 CPU cores (12 high-performance, four high-efficiency) and a GPU that will have no less than 40 graphics cores. In the most modest variant the GPU will have the not inconsiderable figure of 32 graphics cores.
three better than one. As Mark Gurman points out in Bloomberg, the fact of presenting three different chips is something really striking: both when they presented the Apple M1 and when the Apple M2 arrived, those standard versions were launched first, and later the Pro, Max and Ultra variants arrived. . The milestone is even more significant if one considers that all of them will be manufactured with 3 nm photolithography, something that no other manufacturer can aspire to at the moment.
Apple accelerates. The pace of presentation of new chips has accelerated significantly: 19 months have passed from the M1 to the M2, but 16 months have passed since the presentation of the M2 to that of the M3. It is also true that the generation of new Apple computers with M2 chips was a long time coming, and the jump was relatively modest: there were no changes in photolithography, but now there will be changes and that will mean very notable differences in all sections.
New Macbook Pro and new iMac in sight. These chips will supposedly be the protagonists of the new MacBook Pro with M3 chips (Pro and Max, predictably) that will be announced this early morning. If these launches are confirmed, we will be looking at models that arrive just 10 months after the MacBook Pro M2 were presented, something surprising and probably not liked by those who invested in those models. The renewal of some iMacs that had not seen an update for more than 900 days is also expected.