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PRESS RELEASE October 30, 2023
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today announced M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, three chips featuring groundbreaking technologies that deliver dramatically increased performance and unleash new capabilities for Mac. 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. Together, M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max show how far Apple silicon for the Mac has come since the debut of the M1 family of chips. 

All-New GPU Features Dynamic Caching, Mesh Shading, and Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing

With the M3 family of chips, hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time. Ray tracing models the properties of light as it interacts with a scene, allowing apps to create extremely realistic and physically accurate images. This, along with the new graphics architecture, allows pro apps to deliver up to 2.5x the speed of the M1 family of chips. Game developers can use ray tracing for more accurate shadows and reflections, creating deeply immersive environments. Additionally, the new GPU brings hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the Mac, delivering greater capability and efficiency to geometry processing, and enabling more visually complex scenes in games and graphics-intensive apps. This breakthrough GPU architecture enables all of these enhancements and features while maintaining Apple silicon’s legendary power efficiency. In fact, 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.

A Faster and More Efficient CPU

The next-generation CPU in M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max features architectural improvements to the performance and efficiency cores. The performance cores are up to 30 percent faster than those in the M1 family, so tasks like compiling and testing millions of lines of code in Xcode are even faster, and musicians can use hundreds of audio tracks, plug-ins, and virtual instruments in Logic Pro. The efficiency cores are up to 50 percent faster than the efficiency cores in M1, so everyday tasks are faster than ever, while allowing the system to maximize battery life. Together, these cores create a CPU that delivers the same multithreaded performance as M1 using as little as half the power, and up to 35 percent more performance at peak power.

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  1. Results are compared to the previous-generation 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max, a 10-core CPU, a 32-core GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD.
  2. Testing was conducted by Apple in September and October 2023 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M3 Pro, a 12-core CPU, an 18-core GPU, 36GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. The wireless web test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to eight clicks from the bottom. The Apple TV app movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 1080p content with display brightness set to eight clicks from the bottom. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See apple.com/batteries for more information.