5nm vs 3nm maybe? M1/M2 are 5nm.

I think this might be as simple as being the hardware that the reviewer owns.

People on M2 wouldn’t already upgrade.

Depends. Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer.

HN might be missing this part, but I'm pretty happy that product people are still at the helm at Apple. We're talking about cores and this and that, but if you go to, for example, forums for Redshift renderer and hear what users of _tools_ who do things with these cores are saying, they are salivating over the M3.

One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well. Behind the scenes it's working with Maxon, Autodesk, Adobe etc to make things run well, and the information it gathers from working with them informs direction of further R&D. Which is how we came to have hardware-based ray tracing and other things that will actually play a pivotal part in improving end user experience for power users.

> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well

This has been part of their playbook for decades. I distinctly remember some folks from Wolfram (maybe Stephen Wolfram himself?) demo Mathematica running on Intel macs (and talking about how easy it was to port) as part of announcing the transition to Intel.

It was Theo Gray:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M&cbrd=1

100%. They are even paying developers to work on optimizing Blender for Metal, so that Blender was ready for HWRT from day one.

> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well.

What exactly is the problem? Microsoft, Sun etc did the same. Microsoft has a library of software and put in “fixes” so old code that used undefined behavior would continue to run as the os was upgraded.

I don’t think that’s a problem - more like it’s under-appreciated how smart it is. A lot of hardware enthusiasts like to talk about raw capabilities but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used. This is where Apple’s approach is an interesting long-term play: they have been pushing things like the Accelerate framework since the PowerPC days (when you could see e.g. MATLAB get big performance wins simply by dropping in a new BLAS library to replace the unoptimized one it shipped with) and now they’re in the unusual position of being able to line everything up on the same release schedule, too. Sun could have done that on paper but their hardware was rarely competitive and they bit off more than they could chew trying to reinvent every concept of computing portably in Java, and Microsoft has always suffered from being downstream of Intel’s decisions.

> ...but you can end up with something like the Cell processor if you aren’t careful to make sure those features are used.

The Cell hardware didn't turn out how Sony expected either - hence adding an Nvidia GPU at the 11th hour, and bumping up the console price significantly.

I never used it on the console side but we had few pitches for HPC offerings. Back then nobody cared about the GPU but the test runs basically doomed it: the peak performance would have been nice but it required pretty massive rework of each program before the results weren’t bad and we had some memory-latency sensitive workloads which would have suffered horribly. We spent less money on Opterons which were faster on every existing app and since multiple supercomputing systems mixed the two I suspect that was a common decision.

> Hardware-based ray tracing is pretty attractive. As soon as renderers start making use of it, you'll see render speeds practically double over the previous equivalent M2 machines and considering low power consumption and other things, for some the M3 quickly becomes a pretty enticing offer.

Even with hardware acceleration it’s so expensive there is no way they’ll make it a core part of any of their renderers.

I think you may be talking about game engines and realtime rendering when the previous comment was about offline renderers.

Your comment just made me google "apple m3 skyvase", because that's such a delightfully silly idea (using skyvase as an example for offline rendering in 2023, not talking about online renderers in general).

(skyvase.pov was the customary benchmark scene back when pov-ray was a thing, somewhat popular as an FPU-centric real life benchmark in the early Pentium age)

You'd think large software makers like Autodesk would ensure their software works on Mac, but they are the main reason I still have PCs running windows at home – Revit doesn't have a Mac version, doesn't run on Wine and is extremely slow on Windows ARM

> One of the sneakily genius things Apple seems to be doing is, it goes to developers of some of the most "popular" apps and works with them to make their apps work well.

Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.

> Genuine question, what app is able to utilize ANE? It seems like it's been there for multiple generations and yet nothing makes use of it.

It is not directly exposed/documented, but instead leveraged by system ML-oriented frameworks like Core ML and Vision where appropriate.

> People on M2 wouldn’t already upgrade.

Absolutely this.

And the small category of people upgrading from M2 from M3 will do it because they know what they need. They won't be dithering about with random evaluations or reading random blog posts. They'll just buy, infact they probably bought the day of the release.

I believe it’s simply that the performance gains from going to 3nm aren’t nearly as significant as going from 7nm to 5nm. Apple would love to show big performance gains between M2 and M3 if they could.

It was curious when they announced Apple Vision Pro would still be using 5nm. This sheds some light on that decision.

Some professionals on M2 will upgrade.

Anecdotally, A professional photographer I know invests significantly in hardware that speeds him up, and he upgraded from the M1 to the M2 because it allowed him to edit photos faster, allowing him to spend less time per job, so he could do more jobs and make more money. He was able to do math and determine how much time it needed to save him to be a worthwhile investment.

Many photographers suffer from gear acquisition syndrome, GAS, and I wonder how much time was actually saved by the purchase. Did they ever share the math they came up with?

I suspect there’s no good reason to upgrade from M2 to M3. Nonetheless, I did it, and if anyone else is in the same boat I was, I encourage you to look at the trade-in values that Apple is offering for M2 MBPs. They offered something like 90+% of the out-of-pocket price I paid for the M2 six months ago, so it was basically a wash on the trade.

I don’t in any way “need” an M3 but this was a particular painful turn of the ever-rotating upgrade wheel, and the generous valuation on the trade certainly took some of the sting off.

While it's academically interesting; the M2 Pro/Max Macbook Pros were released in January 2023 (9 months ago). It has rarely been more true of any two generations of Apple products to say that no one who owns an M2 Pro is upgrading to M3.

Still, the M3 is the first 3nm processor. It would be interesting to see it compared to the latest 5nm processor (the M2) to see the gain from die switch.

Perhaps not showing it means there is little benefit from going from 5nm to 3nm?

You can only meaningfully determine that if you assume the die is more-or-less the same between the two versions. It is not; the M3 Pro has many changes, the perf/efficiency core ratio is different, they have different amounts of per-core cache, max clock rate, etc. That gets bigger as you move away from the CPU cores (e.g. the GPU is a big architecture change.)

For example, the M3 Pro has 6+6 P/E cores, versus the M2 Pro's 8+4. That is a big change that impacts performance, but can only be truly measured "globally" on a specific workload. The M3 Pro does do better for many workloads despite that. Maybe we could assume the improvement in transistor density gave them enough performance uplift, they were able to get rid of 2 P cores and still come out ahead. Does that mean that 3nm is "bad"? No, it meant it was good enough that it allowed them to make a different tradeoff.

"How much uplift comes from this one exact thing" is not really a super simple question to answer in this case, unfortunately, and there are many factors to control for.

All true, but the same apples to the M1 to M3 comparison, and the architectural differences are likely even greater than between the M2 and M3.

Yes, that's my point. The M1 Pro is also 5nm, would you say that the M1 losing badly to the M3 means 3nm is way better than 5nm? No, the architectural differences mean that trying to derive or compare performance characteristics of the underlying lithographic process is mostly difficult or totally pointless. It doesn't matter whether you use the M1 or the M2 as the baseline. You need to use the same design to understand the lithographic differences, and these aren't the same designs. It's only one small part of the equation.

So going back to your original question, I think the reason people compare the M1 vs the M3, and not M2 vs M3, has nothing to do with making 3nm "look good" or whatever. The reason is more mundane: it's because that's what people would probably upgrade from. Because of all the differences, the only way to know whether an upgrade is worth it is to do workload comparisons, not one-to-one architectural/litho comparisons.

Given the multitude of choices that can affect the performance of the end product beyond just the lithography, it's mostly because the performance uplift going from M1 -> M3 is much more significant than from M2 -> M3.